1.9 New Biology, Not Just New Technology

From the technology perspective, social media seems to be driven by the evolution of software, mobile phone feature integration, and faster microchip speeds and smaller sizes. But that isn’t the whole adaptation story. No, there are other elements of the social media experience that are changing right along with the technology. Using social science and consumer marketing techniques learned over decades, today’s social media platforms are literally rewiring our brains. Or, more accurately, our focused attention on these digital platforms is actively conditioning our brains to respond biologically (dopamine is a powerful drug) in ways that might feel good, but might not be in our best long-term interest.

Let’s take a quick look at how our brains are wired to learn and the role that neurotransmitter chemicals like dopamine play in that role.

In 2015, University of Michigan researchers and professors Arif Hamid and Joshua Berke posit that dopamine levels continuously signal how good or valuable the current situation is in regard to obtaining a reward. This chemical messaging helps people decide how vigorously to work toward a goal, while also allowing themselves to learn from mistakes.1

In other words, the natural regulation of dopamine levels in our brains helps us decide what we should be working toward. The euphoric “hit” of dopamine is a biological signal of a job well done (or a job worth doing well) and the signal that an important task has been accomplished. But what happens when outside influences, such as notification screens, post-engagement metrics, or comments on our feeds, are specifically designed in such a way to trigger that dopamine release?

The dopamine hits we receive in our prefrontal cortex when we check our social feeds and see all those likes, comments, shares, and notifications tells us that we are loved. We are accomplishing important work. Our efforts are being rewarded, and we are admired by others. What do we then choose NOT to do? Once rewarded, where is the gumption and drive to do “real” hard things like school work, or relationship work, or work work? If our brains are getting plenty of happy juice from the social media screens, are we conditioning ourselves to settle for those successes at the expense of perhaps more tangible ones?

These social media platforms have created the perfect mix of public ego-stroking and private anonymity, and from what we know about human behavior, that doesn’t sound like the best idea to begin with. The developers have been hard at work making these social media platforms as psychologically addictive as possible. Not because they are evil people wanting to cause harm to others, but because their objective is to learn what features, notifications, and experiences they could include in the platform to make it “better.” Well, they did their jobs well, because these platforms are now “better” at keeping us tethered to our social network feeds than almost anything else in our lives.