Have you ever heard about something called Facebook stress? Checking Facebook when waking up and before sleeping has become part of the daily ritual of many people around the world. Also giving likes, writing comments and sharing content has been added to the dynamics of social interaction. But what makes this social network so addictive? The answer is dopamine.
For some, Facebook represents an extraordinary marketing platform and the possibility of instant connections that nobody would imagine 30 years ago. For others, Facebook became a way to isolate people, invade their privacy and a source of digital stress.
According to an analysis by the Mediakix agency, the average time a person spends on Facebook is 35 minutes a day. This means that by the end of your life, you will have spent 1 year and 7 months on Facebook.
However, these parameters change constantly as the number of users of social networks increases worldwide. It is estimated that a teenager can spend up to 2.7 hours a day dedicated to interaction on social networks.
More alarming is the fact that if you add the time you spend on Facebook with the time you spend on Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter, you will have spent 5 years and 4 months of your life on social networks.
What is dopamine?
Dopamine, also known as the hormone of happiness and pleasure, is a neurotransmitter present in different areas of the brain. Dopamine is important because it influences nerve responses related to emotions and motor functions.
Among other functions, dopamine is related to brain reward systems. This means that dopamine regulates pleasure sensations, motivation, and curiosity. It also influences decision making, learning, and memory.
The action of dopamine is concentrated in the Accumbens Nucleus. This area is the brain’s main pleasure center because it awakens behaviors to positive and negative emotional stimulus. Get to know more about dopamine.
What is the relationship between Facebook and dopamine?
When Mark Zuckerberg launched the first version of Facebook, he probably never thought that years later, his social network would become a dopamine factory to capture users.
According to Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice president of Facebook, the social network was designed to create repetitive cycles dominated by dopamine.
And how did they do it? Simple, by placing hearts, likes, emoticons, thumbs up, etc. According to one of the Facebook founders, Sean Parker, the main question they asked themselves to attract people to the social network was: how can we consume others’ time and attention as much as possible? That’s how the “like” came up.
For Parker, this small dose of dopamine would be able to generate addiction to the social network slowly. It was expected (and so it happened) that users were captured by the “like”. This reward was introduced as the representation of the acceptance and social validation among Facebook users.
With more than 125 million user connections created since 2004, two million likes a day and one billion comments, Facebook continues to be the most influential and attractive social network for Internet users.
Then, Facebook began to play with what is called gregarious sense. This is when you perceive yourself as part of a social group and at the same time, you feel accepted, listened to, valued, etc.
Continuing with Parker´s opinion, Facebook changed the relationship of individuals with society and thinks that perhaps, this social network interferes with productivity in perverse ways. He even points out that he does not know exactly what Facebook is actually doing to children’s brains.
