There’s a new breed of influencer out there, one whose content is an explicit plea to stop using the app you used to stumble upon their content. They are anti-doom scrolling influencers, and they don’t want to sell you anything. They just want you to break your social media addiction.
An Associated Press feature on anti-doom scrolling influencers like Olivia Yokubonis, better known as Olivia unplugged, shone a spotlight on the new trend. Olivia’s work can be found across the social media spectrum, all of it gently nudging you toward loosening social media’s ironfisted grip on your attention span.
When I hear about Olivia’s mission, I instantly wonder about how much work it takes to make sure her videos end up in people’s timelines and become immediately concerned that she, and others like her, fighting the good fight to free up some bandwidth in our brains, aren’t frying themselves out. She says that she gets the irony of posting anti-scrolling content on pro-scrolling platforms. But she points out that you can’t warn people about the horrors of digital overuse by shouting into a void. You have to go where they are, which means wading into the doom scroll yourself.
Whether these in-feed interventions actually change behavior depends on how engaged users are in the first place. Habitual scrollers may barely register the message before moving on since they are so accustomed to contributing to a creator’s engagement metrics while never fully engaging with the content in a way that sticks.
All this is a part of a larger debate about whether or not heavy social media use qualifies as an addiction. Some researchers argue that the term is overused, since most people who claim they’re addicted don’t show any clinical symptoms of addiction. Ian A. Anderson, a Caltech researcher who spoke with the AP, found that some Instagram users actually are addicted. Still, they only represent a rather small percentage of all who say that they had a genuine social media addiction.
Maybe we have to rethink the concept of addiction when it comes to phone use?
Platforms are designed by teams whose sole job is to keep users scrolling infinitely, which means willpower alone won’t win. You’re fighting a battle against a multibillion-dollar corporate entity whose publicly stated mission is to keep you on its app for as long as they possibly can, individual and societal repercussions be damned. The villain isn’t the phone or the content creators on it; it’s the people who make the social ecosystems within those phones who are the true villains.
You may not meet all the criteria of a clinically diagnosed addiction, but in today’s social media landscape, where inch engagement metrics are king, the ones lording over the algorithms specifically designed to ensnare your attention, permanently if they could, are the ones we are really fighting against.
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