For the previous post in this series and the disclaimer go [here].(https://steemit.com/philosophy/@raycoms/the-brakes-on-human-development-opinion-part-3)

Continuing the series about the brakes on the development of our society, we're arriving at one of the biggest of them which is definitely in my personal top three.

Brake Candidate #3 - Social Media

Now, social media is kind of complicated because it harms us in a number of different ways. Therefore, I'll split this into three subtopics.

Social Media Overdose
Fake News
Sharing Inappropriate Content

Where the first one will be focused on the overuse of social media, the second about spreading false news and the last about inappropriate content getting shared and watched around social media in general.

Social Media Overdose

First of all, one of the main issues with social media is the time people spend, or better, waste with of them.
Following Statista, in the last year, the average daily usage of social media has been around 135 minutes which is a bit more than 2 hours a day.
Which, regarding social-media-today accumulates to a shocking 5 years and 4 months of our lives.
With that, social media ranks in the activities on #2 after television.

Shockingly, we spend only 1 year and 3 months socializing outside of social networks.

Following several scientific reports as in [1] consumption of social media easily leads to addiction since it seems to be an easy source of "happiness hormones" as dopamine for younger generations which satisfy the needs of the human being to feel accepted.

An interesting interview in this is the one of Simon Sinek here which concludes that due to the influence of social media, younger generations are not learning how to socially interact and end up depending strongly on social media. He draws parallels between alcohol addictions and social media usage since both seem to have similar roots.

We, therefore, should ask ourselves if we should really spend as much time connecting through social media. While it is a great commodity not having to leave the house to connect with other people, relationships become liquid [2].
Liquid relationships is a term invited by Zygmunt Bauman which describes the easiness of creating and breaking relationships in the modern world.

Unfortunately, this easily results in short, superficial and unsatisfying relationships not only with our peers but also our partners.

In the end, these superficial relations and the constant feedback loop which keep us hooked to social media often turn us depressive on the long term and are practically the main frontier against a meaningful life.

Short recap: Social media often get us addicted, cost us more than 5 years of our lives and contribute almost nothing of value to our life. Additionally, the usage is strongly connected to low self-esteem and depression.

And, if that didn't convice you yet::

Fake News!

Social media is the perfect breeding ground for fake news. While I agree that modern mainstream media has in many cases become a not very reliable source for news, depending on the topics, these media still have to go through certain levels of quality control (imagine if they wouldn't) and are subject to public discussion.

On the other hand, news which are spread through social media do not require any review process, neither do they need proof or sources.
In the context of this, it has been shown that on social media lies travel faster than the truth [3], [4], [5] which leads to a lot of complications, as for example: people believing absurd statements as believing in a flat earth (You don't need to trust science for that, basic math, or just having 2 eyes is enough to know that's bollox).

Social media helps to spread wrong stories, false facts, lies or if you want to call it fake news in an incredible speed through the internet and if you don't research things thoroughly you can easily be fooled by semi-scientific proofs and well-prepared half evidence.

Which could be avoided by using common sense.

So, how can we prepare ourselves against this?

Harward compiled a nice list of possible steps here.

I'll break it down into some easy steps for you:

Check for spelling mistakes (A well researched and professional article will definitely not be full of errors);
Check for caps and punctuation (Someone who has good sources and proof doesn't need to use a lot of "!!!!" to persuade you);
Check the sources (Does the article present any valid sources? Also, do their sources present valid and trustable sources themselves?)
Check out fact-checking websites (Harward links to FactCheck.org, International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), PolitiFact.com, or Snopes.com)

And, if you're still not sure or too lazy to do the above:

Trust the Math Luke!

Millions of people dying and no one notices it? - Probably not
Millions of people involved in a scam and no one telling it? - Probably not

Sharing Unappropriate Content:

But, as it seems, the above two weren't bad enough.
Social media is also used by many to share a lot of inappropriate content.

This kind of contents ranges from more harmless things to serious things like violence, rape, gore etc.

While people don't want to believe it, if you share this kind of content, or, in my opinion, even watch it, you automatically become a part of it.
You basically automatically become one of the offenders, one of the culprits.
People produce this kind of content because they know there will be someone stupid enough to watch and share it with others.
Everyone watching and sharing this content should take a part of the blame for the crime because they're responsible for people posting this in the first place.

This basically leads to a series of bad things

People post more of this content because they see it becomes popular
Which in turn leads to more people doing this kind of stuff since they see they can become popular
Since they already became dull enough to not care about other people as much anymore.

If we look closely at the above this easily becomes a vicious circle which has enormously negative effects on the humanity and on the quality of life.

Therefore, before watching or sharing this kind of stuff always ask yourself two questions:

Would you like to be the victim in this video/image? No? I guessed so.
Would you like the whole world to see you in this video? No? I guessed so.

Concluding:

As I've shown you in the post until now, social media has the potential to have an incredible impact on all our lives in many different ways. In order to fight this, we have to become more critical. We have to research things thoroughly before we start believing them, we should start preferring human contact to digital contact and we should definitely not share inappropriate content if this content might degrade or hurt, or respectively help degrading or to hurt someone.

The Brakes on Human Development [Opinion] - Part #3 - Social Media