Battle for your eyeballs

March 17, 2024

News and social media are intertwined. Social media is addictive because news is addictive. I mean this about all news.

The difference with social media is people use it to promote things which are not news. Music events, vacation photos, art, personal thoughts, connection.

Social media companies battle it out for your engagement with their content. It is the common commodity in the attention economy. They need you to keep scrolling. It creates an illusion of a relationship. The feed is not set up to allow you to pick and choose who you want to see in a direct way. So you keep scrolling through things you might not find all that interesting and still will end up missing something. In the end there is an ongoing nagging fear of missing out. And this is not a healthy way to live.

I feel like I’m repeating myself, but it’s important to recognize while social media is engaging it also has a subtle way of sucking us into excess. A post by Oliver Burkeman resonates with me:

The short version: one huge factor is the online attention economy, and specifically the way that scrolling, clicking and sharing makes it feel like you’re actively participating in the news cycle, not just observing it.

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The trouble is that human beings can’t really function, let alone thrive, when their primary psychological identification is with things like “the news cycle” or “history” or “the course of world events.” This is the realm in which, pretty much by definition, you exert zero individual control over what happens. So you’re denied the basic sense of “self-efficacy” – of successfully getting things done – on which wellbeing depends. (As mentioned, social media gives the feeling of doing something, but almost never delivers, because you almost never have a real effect.)

I still use social media and read the news, but I would rather replace the doomscrolling with being creative and doing fulfilling things.