After - Social media: loss of empathy, narcissism, and the crescendo of addiction


For my research, I began with finding connections between social media and empathy. The first related article by Berryman, Ferguson, and Negy (2017) argues that the overconsumption of social media does not necessarily affect one's empathic abilities, which was contrasting with my argument. However, as I continue reading it, the key aspect was how one uses social media. For instance, a person can spend over 5 hours a day on social media but the mere exposure time does not imply that it has a negative impact. Quality rather than quantity is superior in this case. Then I found another article about Facebook and its photo feature. This innocent-looking feature might actually be linked to narcissistic behavior since it creates pressure among individuals -especially among females- to create an alluring self-promoting profile with the urge to seek attention from other users (Alloway et al. 2014). Furthermore, a scholar named Konrath did research on students from the time 1979 to 2009, which support my argument that there is a non-negligible decrease in empathetic concern which led to the increase in narcissistic behavior and the more striking part is, this decrease was much more prominent between 2000-2009 which coincides with the emergence of social networking sites. Another survey was held by Michigan University in 2011, claiming approximately 75% of college students are half as empathetic as the ones from 30 years ago.

At this point, the question should be about this: Is social media really pushing us together or pulling us further apart? As I continue with my research, I found a Ted talk by Jacquelyn Quinones, "Is Technology killing our empathy?". She discusses social network sites' general algorithm and claims that even we do not tend to realize, social media isolates us from the things we do not like or understand and pushes us to the things that we like and are familiar with. 

I also dig a little deeper into the effects of Tiktok as it is in fact "the app" of the 21st century when it comes to social media addiction. Yang and Zilberg (2020) imply that Tiktok manages to kill adolescents' boredom since it is a platform that one can escape from reality. When it comes to empathy, Tiktok is actually considered to increase empathetic behaviors since its contents are somewhat sensitive to human psychology. Its main users are between 16 to 24 which can be concluded that the leader of this app is most definitely Gen Z. They are much more sensitive about race, gender, religion, and so on in comparison with earlier generations. So, one can argue that they are empathetic among each other in a more ideological sense but the empathy in daily life (especially face-to-face interaction) is still problematic due to the excessive screen time. Most of the users do not even realize how time passed and the startling part is that they cannot control themselves to close the app (Yang, Zilberg, 2020). Lastly, the user interface strategies that trigger this addiction are also explained in the article. The most significant ones were the scrolling feature, the duration of the videos, and the recommendation algorithm. 


References:

Alloway, Tracy, Rachel Runac, Mueez Quershi, and George Kemp. "Is Facebook linked to selfishness? Investigating the relationships among social media use, empathy, and narcissism." Social Networking 2014 (2014).

Berryman, Chloe, Christopher J Ferguson, and Charles Negy. "Social Media Use and Mental Health among Young Adults." Psychiatric Quarterly 89, no.2 (2018): 307-14

TEDxTalks. (2016, June 23). Is technology killing our empathy? / jacquelyn quinones / tedxiheparis. Youtube. Retrieved October 20, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOhXJPO7PjE.

Yang, Yuxin, and Instructor Elana Zilberg. "Understanding Young Adults' TikTok Usage." (2020).


  




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