This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The case against social media has become so well rehearsed that most people can easily merge it into ordinary conversation: It makes people lonely. It sorts them into camps.
It hands them a room full of people who already agree with them and calls that a community. I've given this speech myself, with feeling, having read my phone notifications in the host's powder room 11 minutes earlier. I am a pediatrician, health communicator and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, and diagnosing is in my blood.
Two decades of research, a surgeon general's advisory on loneliness and Meta's recent settlement of up to $17 billion, pending court approval, all describe the same thing. What we recite are the symptoms. The more interesting question is what these symptoms diagnose.
Simply put, our dependency on social media creates a deficiency disease. It's not something toxic we're ingesting; it is something our lives online have stopped us from receiving. I figured out that cost while standing in a field in Harford Park with a dog leash wrapped around my ankles.
Harford Park in Wayne, Pennsylvania, is 30 acres (12 hectares) of rolling grass and mature trees the township designated for off-leash dogs in 1997. So do the same 15 or 20 people, which is how I ended up tangled in someone else's very long leash on a Tuesday, concentrating hard enough on my own feet that I stopped talking and just listened. Two conversations were running at once.
In one, a regular who is having a rough year was getting gently harassed about the weight he'd put on against his doctors' advice—first by me, then by three other people who piled on uninvited. In the other, someone was arguing about Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the regulars chimed in on both sides.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
