Blog 5: Social Media Addiction

Marshall Rudd 

The overall message of this video is saying that social media is addicting and is ruining our lives by eliminating our attention span. They are saying that the design of social media makes it addictive. They think this because of features like notification and other little things make people keep going back to their social media page. This overall message might scare some people when they use social media and might not use it anymore and this could affect some companies a lot.

 Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University. Newport is concerned for the future generation about how their concentration could be reduced. Newport stated, “when you take large portions of your day checking social media that this can permanently reduce your capacity for concentration.” This is showing how addictive social media can be and show that social media addiction can affect you in a massive way. 

Steven Kotler is a American author, journalist, and entrepreneur. Kotler is concerned that social media is addictive as drugs and kids have easy access to it. Kotler says, “we are essentially putting highly addictive drugs in the hand of kids.” Kotler is saying that social media is so addictive you can compare it to drugs and that is something that is scary to think of and this points to the overall message of this media. 

Chamath Palihapitiya is a venture capitalist and the founder of Social Capital. Palihapitiya is concerned that social media can ruin peoples behavior. Palihapitiya said that “social media is eroding the core foundations of how people behave.” He says this because it can be so addictive it can ruin how people behave toward you and it might even ruin friendships and ruin lives because people try to mock others on social media that show one little part of their life. 

What I think personally of the primary message of this video I really do think social media is addictive and I think it can ruin attention span in a massive way, also I think it can cause tensions between other people. Social media can be dangerous and cause people to do stuff celebrities do and sometimes it is usually not the smartest thing to do. I think what Cal Newport said can be true because using any social media usually ruins people's concentration so much, that they can get off track. Then Steven Kotler also came up with a good comparison to say that social media is like a highly addictive drug because most people cannot go a day without using social media. Social media can also be dangerous like Chamath Palihapitiya said that social media erodes the foundations on how people behave which can be true sometimes because a lot of people on social media have something to argue about a lot of the time and it can go on forever. What I learned from the video is that social media is for sure one of the most addictive things in most people's life and it can ruin someone's concentration if used too much.