Hooked
How Instagram has you Hooked.
When you’re young, your life revolves around seeking approval from your parents. When you’re a teenager, you start to focus on getting social validation from your peers.
A Harvard study shows that when you receive a notification from social media, your brain releases dopamine — a chemical reward that makes you feel good. That combination of having easy access to your social media and random notifications develops this need to be constantly checking your phone for any new notifications and develops this desire of wanting to receive notifications.
Social media is an addiction. Instagram is an addiction. Instagram has been designed to make its users addicted similarly to the way someone would become addicted to painkillers, or drugs.
Taking it back a step…
When you open someone’s Instagram profile, it tells a story. A story that they’ve spent time carefully crafting into their version of perfection. The reality is that Instagram is never a person’s whole story.
It’s the happiest parts of their lives, the parts they feel proud of and want to put on display for the rest of the world to see. The parts that can trigger jealousy in those who are looking, or even simply just make people feel bad.
By nature, humans have always been competitive as we’ve grown up in environments where we and those around us are constantly making comparisons between people.
Instagram gives us access to such a readily available comparison tool, where you start unintentionally comparing your whole story to a small fragment of someone else's.
Perception
Going deeper into the story, let’s take a look at each page in a story.
Filters and editing tools have been becoming increasingly accurate.
The level to which these filters re-shape your face, reduce blemishes and overall create a completely unrealistic standard of beauty is obscene. I am terrified.
~ Harrison Nolan
For the most part, what you see is not real. Even celebrities like Kylie Jenner who have spent thousands of dollars perfecting their look have been seen photoshopping their pictures or using heavy filters on top of their makeup.
This has caused society to create an unrealistic perception of beauty. These expectations that many have developed for themselves are not real and this has caused so many more issues related to mental health and self-esteem as well.
Relationships
Nowadays, a lot of kids will admit that majority of their friendships are superficial, and that they don’t truly know how to form deep, meaningful relationships.
“Yes, my friends are fun but I don’t think I can actually count on them, if someone better comes along I’m sure they’ll move along”
~ 14 year old student
The majority of teenagers have described some sort of friendship they’ve had or still have as “fake”. A fake friendship is when people are friends for the sake of being friends, don’t have the best intentions in mind, and those who have portrayed to be 2-faced — acting one way in front of your face, and another behind your back.
Social media has portrayed to encourage the culture of fake friends. The average person seems to have double the amount of “friends” online in comparison to in person.
“Perhaps we love the illusion of social media friendships because we can act as we would if (in reality) we were not afraid to confront or interact with people honestly.”
~ Heather Poole
Many adolescents simply don’t develop a strong support system, and lack strengthened coping mechanisms for intense emotions like stress.
As a result of this, many turn to social media to provide them with that temporary relief of mindlessly scrolling through an endless feed of posts, instead of learning how to deal with these emotions in a healthy manner.
On top of that, social media has been commonly known as a tool for procrastination. Not in the mood to do something? Okay, let’s scroll through Instagram just for a couple of minutes.
Before you know it, 3 hours have gone by and all you’ve done is scroll.
The Scope
In just 10 years and with over 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram went from a square photo-sharing app to one of the most intricate and addictive apps out there currently on the market.
The average individual spends 2.5 hours on Instagram a day. Now imagine if they did that every single day of the year.
2.5 hours on Instagram, every day for 30 days. That means they spend (30*2.5) 75 hours on the app in one month. Out of the 30 days, an average user spends over (75/24) 3 full days on Instagram. Scaling that up, means that every year that user would spend over one full month (3*12 = 36 days) simply interacting with the app.
How is it that Instagram is able to keep its users so HOOKED?
The Algorithm
Each person’s Instagram is personalized and tailored to their desires using a machine learning model that allows Instagram to keep its users hooked. The algorithm continuously learns about a person and is better able to personalize your feed, your stories, your explore page, and your IGTV & Reels.
Feed
Nowadays, Instagram’s algorithm focuses on posts that a user may be the most captivated by through using factors such as a user’s:
- Interests: Depending on your account interaction history (e.g. posts you liked, comment on, pictures you’re tagged in, etc.) the algorithm will make those certain types of “like” posts category appear higher on your specific feed.
- Relationships: The algorithm prioritizes posts from people you care about you, your friends and your family. They put theoretically figure this out based on the people whose content you like, the people you direct message, search for, and even the people you know in real life. Right when you follow someone, Instagram will try to calculate your relationship with that person by serving you their content and monitoring how you engage with it.
- Timeliness: Instagram prioritizes showing you the most recent, and popular posts since the last time you opened the app. Therefore, a person who doesn’t visit Instagram much may only see the biggest hit posts.
Your Instagram story feed is portrayed using a similar algorithm to your feed. Instagram uses the accounts you interact with most to prioritize the stories that show up first.
While your feed consists of people you already follow, your explore page (including the IGTV & Reels) uses the same metrics and applies them to people you don’t already follow to tailor those posts to your engagement.
Experts have designed Instagram to keep users captivated on the app for as long as possible, which has contributed to its success of being one of the most used and addictive apps in the world. Despite this, the reality is that an excess of any social media can contribute to being detrimental to mental health, and all in all one’s quality of life.
Recognize if you’re addicted to social media, and if you know you are, do something about it.
