How Social Media and Your Brain Became a Codependent Couple - Part 1
Part 1 of 2
It Started with Connection.
Conspiracies aren't ever clear until the last piece of the puzzle. Obvious in reverse once you know the whole story. As I've watched how social media and our inability to look away evolved, I was pretty sure this was going to be a good one. Some super sinister plan from the start. But now I'm thinking it wasn't. For sure the addiction is real, but my take is that it's a long movie with two characters: your brain and an algorithm — both doing what they were built for.
No way I believe it was purely innocent, but it started out not far from it. Facebook set out to connect people, and it worked. It tapped into a basic human need: social connection and instantly dissolved miles and years. In a couple of keystrokes, you could have a high school reunion without leaving the house: who ended up where, what they're up to, who still looked great and who didn't. And that led us down a rabbit hole of searching online for old friends and reconnecting like no time had passed — hey, you'll never believe what happened to...The algorithm noticed, did what it was programmed to do: give you more of what you want. Connections grow, engagement increases. And slowly it became part of your day.
The Brain Gets Its First Hit of Dopamine.
Now let's talk about the brain. Depending on the emotion, the body produces different hormones. In this case, it's dopamine — the one that's about anticipation and reward. It's the vibe you feel when you're getting ready to go on vacation, and again when you get on the plane. The difference with social media is that it's available every minute, not just for your summer vacation. With digital connections, as soon as you start to anticipate finding someone and get the payoff when you do, dopamine shows up. And since you can do it all day from anywhere, it gets addictive. You want more, the brain wants more. Our brains are built for short term hits, not a steady dopamine drip. Tech outpaced our biology, and our brain biology will never catch up.
Here's where the relationship starts to get unhealthy. The algorithm notices what you're doing and doubles down thinking..."I'm nailing this. I know what he clicks on, how much time he's there. I know what he likes, my job is to help him connect to what he likes...so I should suggest more. I'll offer up — people you might know, groups you might like...or I'll start checking the boundaries of what he's looking at and find adjacent things he's not even thought to click on yet."
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Then the Relationship Got Toxic.
It's easy to justify to ourselves — I'm just reconnecting with old friends.
True.
Or, I'm making new connections with people who like rock climbing.
True.
But it's too easy. When you had to plan the vacation before getting excited about it, that took some work. When you had to pack your gear and make actual connections with other climbers you meet, there was some effort to earn the dopamine. But readily available dopamine with just a click changed everything. No effort, all reward.
When Connection Became the Product.
The people behind the semi-innocent new tech started to realize something: they know your eyes spend a lot of time fixed on a screen, the algorithm knows what you like and a bit of who you are — you like rock climbing and travel, have young kids, opened a restaurant, went to Virginia Tech. The business opportunity emerges: match our users with advertisers who are seeking people likely to buy. And in an instant, we were all monetized. Your profile and ones like yours began to be sliced, diced and aggregated to build an audience profile for advertisers.
Connections became bait, ad money became the goal. Or...when the product you're using is free, you're the product.
Was this the plan from the start? My take: it didn't start out that way. But I do think it's more complicated than a simple yes or no. It's hard for me to believe that some guys in a college dorm set out to get us addicted to a screen. It seems unlikely to me that they knew the neuroscience and behavioral psychology and built a platform to exploit both. But I do think that once the business guys spotted it, Silicon Valley had no shortage of behavioral psychology and neuroscience consultants landing gigs. And taking a situation from bad to worse, there's brain chemistry way stronger than dopamine. And by chance or by design, they figured it out.
The Likes Turned It Into a Slot Machine.
So let's jump a year or two. By 2010, Facebook had about 600 million users and hit a billion by 2012. More than 10% of the planet. Somewhere in there, they figured out that we love validation and approval. New feature: likes, comments, shares, saves. The more there are, the more validation we feel. And the algorithm rewards a post that gets engagement by making it more visible. This took us to the next level of addiction: how many people are paying attention to me? How many like me? What are my people saying? Anticipate the reward — dopamine, get the payoff — dopamine.
But there's more. The programmers at Instagram figured out that the longer you anticipate a payoff, the bigger the win when it happens, making you chase it. So they made you wait for it..."any likes yet? no? how about now? just one. uuuf that's not a lot. maybe I should check again. Hey look there's 40 now — maybe I'm trending or something — I should keep checking." And you did. What you didn't know is they were batching what made you happy (likes) to drop in groups to rent your attention a little longer, increasing your value to advertisers.
Cheap dopamine was just the beginning. In Part 2 — how this quietly tore us apart, why it's doing more damage than you think, and what I actually try to do about it.
Thrive on.
Brian, Founder — Balanced Vibe