Addiction To Social Networks: The Abuse Of The Virtual
In Psychology and mental health in general, the concept of addiction is very focused on chemical dependence on substances; In fact, in the main diagnostic manuals the only case of addiction to something that is not a drug that is mentioned is that of gambling addiction, one in which one cannot stop playing games of chance.
However, outside the clinical sphere there are other conceptions about what is understood by “addiction”, and these tend to change more quickly than the more or less rigid categories reached through scientific consensus. This is especially noticeable in the field of new technologies, where people are already beginning to talk about a relatively new phenomenon: social media addiction. And the widespread use of the Internet has its advantages, but also its risks.
As its name indicates, social media addiction is a dependency relationship that someone develops towards these virtual platforms of interaction with others, although in reality there is something more than this. People who become obsessed with social networks do not think all the time about the pleasure that using the social network makes them feel, but rather about what is achieved through that platform.
This means that the use of these services does not generate a “pleasure peak”, but what is gained is rather the fact of avoiding disappearing from the social map. Normally the goal is not to seek a reward, but rather to prevent missing events, not finding out about certain news, etc. It is something reminiscent of the phenomenon of FOMO (fear of missing out) syndrome, with which this type of addiction is related.
On the other hand, it must be taken into account that addiction to social networks is not simply the creation of a dependency on the use of computers. In fact, if anything now characterizes social networks are everywhere: tablets, smartphones, PCs and other conventional computers… even in virtual networks that are accessed through video game consoles.
The appearance of this problem on the Internet
One of the most negative aspects of social media addiction is that there are many people who can fall into it. The reason is that these tools They do not have the bad reputation of, for example, illegal drugs, and that the fact that others use them creates more reasons to join the phenomenon. Even for professional reasons, in many sectors it is advisable to open a profile on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Secondly, as social networks have gone far beyond the computer, they can follow us everywhere from tablets or smartphones, from which they can periodically invade our lives through vibrations and sounds. In Psychology, this can be understood as a learning process that leads to a single result: thinking all the time in terms of social networks, since they constantly remind us that they are there.
In the case of adolescents, their tendency towards impulsivity and their need to have a broad and expansive social influence can cause them to quickly fall into these types of tendencies. Facebook, for example, offers the added value of bringing together all types of social interactions in one place: publishing photographs and selfies, sharing links and multimedia content such as songs or humorous videos with which one feels identified, publishing of the existence or not of a romantic relationship, etc.
If a few years ago the stereotype of a person obsessed with new technologies was a teenage or young adult male with a small number of friends who could not get away from the computer, currently those addicted to social networks present a much more heterogeneous profile that is Young women and adolescent girls with relatively good social skills have been added en masse.
Social networks are currently understood no longer as a limitation of relationships, but rather as have become the public “showcase” that must be passed through almost obligatorily to be someone relevant in a community of friends and acquaintances, whether large or small, or to gain fame in places that will never be visited.
In this way, a Facebook profile is much more than a means to maintain contact with acquaintances: it is the ecosystem in which everything relevant in social terms will occur. Not in vain, for example, a concept has been created to refer to the fact that a courtship does not truly begin until it appears in a Facebook status: we speak of “Facebook official” relationships.
