Social Media and Infinite Scrolling

Once you pick up your phone to check a message, an hour vanishes. To check the message, you slide into social media. Five minutes later, you are watching a penguin sliding down an ice. Ten minutes later, you are giggling at the jokes of Kapil Sharma and Dr. Mashoor Gulati. Half an hour later, you are watching celebrities coming out of the gym and paparazzi running behind them. Once you realize you have wasted hours in the wildness of this content.

This is not an incident. This is the new way of life—the new normal. Our phone screens are becoming more addictive. But why are we spending so much time on trivial content? The answer is infinite scrolling—yes, that bottomless and endless stream of content that keeps us hooked and glued to the screen. It is designed in a particular way to keep you glued to the endless stream of scrolling, your thumbs swiping, and your brain starving for “just one more post.” The result is that we are spending more time in the quixotic world of virtual reality than looking at the real faces, nodding slightly into conversations, and trading our attention for a stream of bite-sized dopamine hits.

In an age where time and attention are currency, phone screens are cruelly robbing us of it, not loudly but gently and softly, and replacing it with endless swiping. 

How does infinite scrolling work?

The rudimentary goal of the infinite goal is simple—to keep you delving deeper into the stream of content and removing the fiction of jumping into the next page. Tech corporations have realized that once you switch to another page, you might disengage with the app. For this particular reason, infinite scrolling has been developed.

It is time to reclaim our time and attention, rather than being distracted by Ducky Bhai, Rajab Bhutt, Sham Idress, or other social media influencers who accumulate wealth at our expense.

Social Media feeds, including Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, are a post grid system. Once the user reaches the bottom of the content, the app triggers for more content. Now here is when real magic happens. The server, then, does not send all the posts at once; it instead uses pagination. With pagination, the following posts are rendered by a recommendation algorithm based on your likes, mood, and interests.

AI algorithms analyze your behavior and mood. It observes how much time you spend on what type of content. A person who likes cars will watch videos related to cars. Once that person starts to spend more time on car videos, the AI algorithm studies this behaviour. It starts to suggest more car-related videos in their feed. As an observation, check your social media feeds because AI algorithms know our moods and likes more than we do.

This is designed to keep the user engaged with the vast amount of content, thereby increasing engagement. AI algorithms encourage ‘just one more scroll’ behaviour that is tied to the dopamine reward cycle of the brain.

Psychological Effects of Addiction:

Our brains like novelty. Reels, memes, streaks, and funny videos through social media provide novelty by releasing hits of dopamine. Dopamine is a chemical released in the human body when they are happy and satisfied.

We receive instant gratification when we receive a notification through social media, when someone likes our posts, when someone reacts to our sent reels on Instagram, or when someone reacts to our WhatsApp status. Our brain constantly releases dopamine hits when we receive rewards through social media notifications. This excessive release of dopamine is harmful to our brains.

Similarly, social media has trained our brains to expect novelty every few seconds by capturing our attention. The endless stream of videos has brought a new adaptability to our brains. We want everything to be quick, short, and entertaining because of the endless stream of videos we watch on social media.  With this new adaptability, we skim longer texts, lectures, and tasks.  Instead of deep reading and thinking, our brains are adapted to shallow scanning. Our brains can only process a limited number of things at once, and our attention gets split when we add tons of content through social media scrolling. This reduces our ability to concentrate on one thing for an extended period.

Another prominent psychological effect is FOMO, referred to as Fear of Missing Out, which is associated with infinite scrolling. It triggers when you constantly check for social media apps, like checking before sleeping and first thing after waking up, to know you might not miss anything. In this process, you start to compare your life with the curated highlight reels of others. You will feel insecure and pressured when you see your friends and influencers’ achievements in your feed. Like, Ducky Bhai purchasing a new house, giving gifts to his wife, and surprising his family with a new car. This gives birth to comparison anxiety when you start to compare your life with others. You will begin to believe that they are more successful and happier, while your life feels stuck and unworthy.

What needs to be done: Breaking the Cycle

If humans can conquer pandemics like Covid-19 and step on the surface of moon, breaking the cycle of social media scrolling can also be done. Every baby step taken in the path can prove to be a giant leap in future. If we are too addicted to our phone screens, going cold turkey can be futile because we might continue not using them for a few days and then switch back Given below are a few strategies and steps, if taken, can save our time and attention:

• Setting time limit: Before delving into the wildness of social media, we must set time. Like “Twenty minutes is enough.” Also, downloading app timers to inform you when the time is done as iPhones have in-built time alerts.
• Turning-off the notifications of Social Media Apps: This will help us to save time and ensures that we do not slip into social media.
• Replacing habits with other activities: If phone is consuming too much time in scrolling, why not indulge in other real world activities which are more healthy and productive like reading a book before bed-time, taking a walk in a park, and starting a new hobby that engages mind and body.
• Adopting digital minimalism: This can be a productive initiative. Using Social media and going live when needed the utmost.

In a nutshell, it can be reiterated that social media is, indeed, a Frankenstein monster, and infinite scrolling is not just a harmful habit; it is carefully designed to trap our attention. The endless stream of social media has always something new to show us, but time is finite and can not be repaid. Every hour we scroll is an hour taken from fully living in the real world. The question is whether we are ready to ponder how much time we are dedicating to social media scrolling—are we prepared for the steps to take? It is time to reclaim our time and attention, rather than being distracted by Ducky Bhai, Rajab Bhutt, Sham Idress, or other social media influencers who accumulate wealth at our expense. How much time do we continue to squander on such content and endless scrolling? It is time to act.

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