Social media is fundamentally changing the ways in which we experience the emotions of other people and how we express our own emotions publicly. Understanding this shift requires acknowledging that, to the companies designing platforms like Facebook and Twitter, our emotions are treated as a valuable resource. Network designers create features, such as the initial question on Facebook, "What's on your mind?", to make our emotions as clearly obvious and evident to others—and to the platform itself—as possible.
The Constrained Emotional Palette
One of the striking ironies of our current emotional landscape online is the limited range of expression we are given. When Facebook rolled out its six reaction features (beyond the simple 'Like'), allowing users to add a heart, a sad face, or an angry face, founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed the goal was to allow people to express empathy. However, this empathy was channeled into a finite, discrete set of emotions.
This constraint is particularly jarring when contrasted with simultaneous developments in robotics. In the same year these six reactions were introduced, a robot named Pepper was released onto the market, trained to recognize 62 different facial and neck architectural features of humans. While robots were learning a broad and complex spectrum of human emotion, users on social media were restricted to a mere half-dozen emotional responses.
Emotional Whiplash and Inconsistency
The way news feeds and timelines are structured actively contributes to emotional inconsistency. Users are often asked to experience two completely different kinds of emotions in rapid succession. One moment, a timeline may show a heartwarming post, such as a best friend’s child toddling around, eliciting a feeling of warmth and excitement. The very next post could be devastating news about a tragedy, forcing a quick, jarring "gear change" in our emotional responses. This lack of emotional consistency means we are constantly being jerked in our affective responses from one extreme to the next, a radical alteration of our internal emotional landscapes that will be a defining challenge of this century.
The Dopamine Trap of Addictive Algorithms
The core objective of social media commerce is to maximize the time a user spends on the site. To achieve this, websites are designed using addictive algorithms that tap into fundamental human psychology. A classic example is the slight, deliberate delay before the number of new notifications appears. This pause creates a basic human response where we wait to see something that is variable and changing.
When a category of data that we are monitoring changes—like the count of new notifications or emails—we receive a small hit of dopamine. This brief moment of anticipation and subsequent reward, even for something as simple as checking a notification count, reinforces the behavior and encourages us to return to the site. In this manner, social media platforms are meticulously engineered to exploit the structure of our emotional lives and keep us perpetually engaged.
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