Week 1 B: Social Media Use Today

I have some very strong thoughts and beliefs about social media usage. Overall I see social media as a tool to both stimulate the limbic system and connect all individuals that use it in a spectacular way in that we are all nodes on the network - like leaves on a giant tree. I will expand on what I mean by a tool that stimulates the limbic system. The limbic system is the system of nerves and networks in the brain making up the area near the edge of the cortex concerned with instinct and mood - the limbic system controls the basic emotions such as fear, pleasure, and anger as well as the primal drives such as hunger, sex, dominance, care of offspring. I believe that in one way or another all social media platforms are a tool to stimulate the emotions and primal drives and that all posts, videos, likes, comments, retweets, are different sides of the same coin trying to generate as much limbic resonance as possible. The more limbic resonance there is - the more a person is entertained or drawn in, and the more a person or group or company will gain traffic as a result. 

Some applications and websites generate more limbic resonance than others, such as TikTok and Instagram. On Instagram for example one could say that the emotions of pleasure, anger, fear (and the others) as well as primal drives such as hunger, sexual stimulation, and dominance are wrung dry to maximum effect with users ability to pick and choose the very very best pictures of themselves, clips of their lives, and more than that - they are able to edit those pictures and videos to make them look as good as possible. Certain users and posts elicit different responses, some of them show the very best food and people eating that food eliciting hunger, some show "sexy and raunchy" images and videos - eliciting pleasure, sexual drive (and sometimes anger), some post images and pictures that directly or indirectly elicit fear and anger. The individuals consuming all of this content post comments, emojis, like images and videos, retweet them, etc which in turn leads to stimulation of the creators' limbic systems, feeding off the comment section and likes as if they were a fresh stream concentrated liquid love straight from the source, without all of the time and effort it would take to get the same compliments and comments and "likes" in real life. The drive of dominance becomes a huge factor in competition here.  With Instagram, individuals are essentially their own PR agents and they always go towards "Glamorous" and when somebody does say "#No Filter" many people now think "Wow, you're so brave." 

 With this in mind, it is very easy to see how many people can become extremely addicted to these social media applications where they can constantly get love and adulation from strangers, comments, and have the ability to project a distorted version of what they really are. A huge issue with social media is that, by design, on Instagram particularly, people look like they have a much better life than they really do, people posts pictures of when they are happy, modifying them to be better looking, even if they are not modifying the pictures they are at very least selecting the pictures for best lighting and angle. People look much better and seem much happier and this leads to individuals looking at all of these "happy beautiful people" and think to themselves "I'm not that happy and I'm not that good looking so I must suck" even though many of the people on Instagram and other social media applications are very sad. In general, individuals think of themselves in relation and relative to others - we are constantly re-baselining our expectations and if individuals are not careful, they can become very damaged. 

Most platforms are for both business and personal use although some are more for personal and some more for business use. Twitter is great for business use as it can be a way for businesses to give constant updates and advertisements on their products and services as well as allow individuals to keep track of their favorite businesses. Instagram is more for personal use although many marketers use the network to promote their business. Facebook is a very popular platform for marketers worldwide and was the most commonly used platform in 2021 for marketers. I am only using Facebook and LinkedIn personally, and only one or two times a month at that. Although, I plan on using Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and more for my business when I do start it. In fact I have pages set up for my business already, although they are inactive until I get the business running.