User:Yunna98/sandbox

social media addiction

 * Excessive use of the internet leads to the addition of social media platforms. The article classified those addictions into five subtypes: cyber sexual addiction, cyber relationship, social media addition (online social interactions), net compulsions (gambling, shopping, or day trading), information overload, and computer addiction (gaming). Even though some specific techniques that render users addicted to products have been changed since they were first designed, three of these design elements are worth pointing out. The first one is the use of intermittent variable rewards. By giving variable reinforcement, those platforms prolong users' curiosity to keep users spending more time on it. For example, within offering a glimpse of what will go next, users will like to scroll to see the full picture which makes the whole process endless. Besides generating intermittent variable rewards, social media platforms also implement reward schemes to take advantage of users' desires for social validation and reciprocity. Facing pressure most of the time, young users try to seek validation, and like buttons or interactions from others are playing a role here. The third problem is platforms designs erode natural stopping cues. For example, before infinite scrolls, users have the right to stop or quit from that page. It would be a signal for users to stop addiction but right now most platforms remove it to allow users to continue using their platforms. Though social media addiction is not completely recognized as a "real addiction" studies show that those who are addicted to social media use exhibit behavioral symptoms after stopping use such as salience, tolerance, conflict, withdrawal, relapse, and mood modification. These symptoms are identical to "typical" addictions such as alcoholism and drug addiction.
 * Solutions that are outlined in "Ethics of the Attention Economy: First, the paper said, “Scholars should not see engineering ethics questions as divorced from business ethics, and vice versa”. They should treat the problems as a whole since it is impacting society significantly. Second, even though technology plays an essential role in K-12 education, teachers should be more aware of the costs of the technology. On the premise of ensuring the reasonable use of technology, the students are ready for their future education. Third, the designers and engineers can use their design feature, addiction, for the opposite purpose. They can be more transparent and honest with the users, telling the users that particular designs of social media may elicit addiction. This can be a warning for the users if they want to stay away from spending too much time on social media. Lastly, policymakers should step in between tech companies in order to have them lower the barriers users face to quitting social media, as they should make it simple for the users to delete or deactivate their account.