Imagine you’re watching the person you admire waking up in the morning, going through her routine which consists of going to the gym, preparing delicious meals for her family, going on pleasant walks with her dog, all while sharing more about herself. As the end of yet another “A Day in My Life” TikTok approaches, so does the end of your day. You realize you have spent the last two hours mindlessly scrolling through TikTok video after TikTok video, constantly living somebody else’s life. Now, besides the headache you may be experiencing from the digital eye strain, there are more serious underlying reasons for why this pastime is problematic.
Using your watch history, TikTok tailors an array of irresistible content displayed on your “For You Page,” luring you into watching more videos. Each TikTok video is like a wave, continuously stimulated by the wind, or in this case, your scrolling finger. The most frightening issue, however, is that you have no idea whether the stories you “accept,” or the people you “meet,” or the news you “learn” are even close to being true. Furthermore, with TikTok taking away time from true face-to-face interactions in your life, you find yourself drowning in this sea of irrelevance with no normal human interaction to pull you out from under the waves.
So, at the end of this uneventful day, you find that you are angry, both at your phone for being such a big distraction, and at yourself for succumbing to the invisible hold your iPhone seems to have on you. But in reality, it is the use of technology by companies that is to blame; their evolving methods of engaging us by creating an addicting platform for their users poses the threat of negatively impacting our perceptions of the world at large.
Our smart devices, which seem to possess magical powers to lure us in, do not utilize magic to hook us in, but rather artificial intelligence that collects behavioral data to create algorithms personalized for you. Journalist, Jia Tolentino, explores the negative impact of artificial intelligence which makes apps such as TikTok more addictive. In her article, “The Meme Factory: How TikTok Holds Our Attention,” published in The New Yorker, Tolentino argues that the goal of these algorithms is to keep us on the platform for longer.
The more time you spend on social media, the more information you are exposed to. However, as it turns out, oftentimes what we are presented with online is an illusion of the truth. To put into more detail, the creators on TikTok choose what content they wish to share with their viewers, usually cherry-picking the best moments to record. In this way, the power of videos uploaded to social media is similar to the power of photography that Susan Sontag, American writer and critic, describes in her book On Photography.
In one of the most highly regarded books within its genre, Sontag published a collection of essays through which she claimed that photography has the power to influence our perception of the world. Sontag refers to photographs as an illusion of reality, as they cannot tell the full story going on behind the picture frame.
“But essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own… to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude,” Sontag writes.
Sontag delves into the idea that photographs, despite capturing moments of reality, are not accurate depictions of the whole truth because they present only a partial and selective view of the events they depict. For this reason, photographs have the power to shape and mediate our perceptions of the world around us.
Similarly, videos posted online affect the way we perceive the information in them, because it is handpicked by the content creators themselves. So if you recall that “A Day in My Life” TikTok from earlier, you may wonder whether that person you saw on screen might actually have a completely different day, or even personality off camera. As a consequence, the curated content people share on platforms like TikTok suggests a false reality, creating an illusion of perfection while selectively omitting the full truth about their lives.
Yet another danger of technology stems from its ability to manipulate our thoughts through the spread of misinformation. With our addiction to the internet, we can fall victim to the media brainwashing us into adopting certain values and beliefs, simply by repeatedly feeding us the same myth. “The Effects of Repetition Frequency on the Illusory Truth Effect,” co-written by Sarah Barber, a professor in the Psychology department at Georgia State University, uses cognitive research to support the finding that repeated exposure to information makes it seem more truthful.
The article states that “repetition can affect beliefs about truth. People tend to perceive claims as truer if they have been exposed to them before.” Referred to as the illusory-truth effect, this phenomenon explains why misinformation is so commonly accepted as the truth and how people of all ages can fall victim to blindly believing misinformation.
The key to the illusory-truth effect is repetition, and what does a better job of hammering the same outrageous information at you than the internet? Therefore, our media has essentially turned into a weapon that can confuse and manipulate us, normalizing beliefs even if they aren’t based on facts.
American journalist Eli Saslow examined this phenomenon. He brought awareness to the spread of misinformation online in order to make social media users more cautious of the information they consume. In the article, Shirley Chapian, a 76 year old Facebook addict, is a prime example of a social media user that has become so attached to her screen, her limited interaction with people outside of her facebook group hinders her social awareness of the world at large. As a result of Chapian spending all her time reading and re-posting fake news posts without fact-checking any of them, she develops a false sense of reality.
With social media acting as a broken telephone, distorting the original truth, we lose our ability to think critically. For Chapian, this presents itself as her changing her political views based on the information she reads from her Facebook groups. Spending so much time online, she gets exposed to the same outrageously false information a numerous amount of times, making her numb to how disturbing the content of the posts is.
Ignorant to this fact, Chapian ends up adding to the amount of propaganda online by “Instead of responding directly to strangers on America’s Last Line of Defense [a Facebook page she follows], Chapian wrote on her own Facebook page. ‘Nasty liberals,’ she said, and then she went back to her news feed, each day blending into the next.” Chapian’s actions prove how a severe dependency on social media platforms as a place to interact with others and educate ourselves, harms our perception of the truth.
While social media platforms have brought about many positive changes, the media has become a major disturbance in our real lives. American author, educator and media theorist, Neil Postman, examines how “entertaining media” affects public discourse in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Taking into account that the text was published in 1985, it becomes apparent that this issue continues to persist.
Considering “man’s almost infinite appetite for distraction,” which Postman acknowledges in the Foreword to his book, it becomes easy for companies to take advantage of our dependence on technology. Therefore, it is imperative to recognize that it is in our hands – both literally and figuratively – to decide what we do with our screens.
Only after being mindful of our unhealthy dependency on the media and the toll it can take on us, can we keep the threats of the media at bay while utilizing technology for its many benefits.
So the next time you find yourself watching “A Day in My Life” video, it’s a sign for you to get off social media and live your day to the fullest.
