I never understood what Cal Newport meant when he compared social media to a slot machine, but now I think I do. When you pull the lever, you don’t know whether or not you’ll obtain a reward...that’s the whole point. Similarly, a profile picture update may or may not have gotten likes in the last hour. If we were guaranteed that every hour we checked Facebook we would obtain two more likes, we wouldn’t be interested. If we were guaranteed that every hour we checked Facebook we would obtain zero more likes, we wouldn’t be interested. Like a slot machine, a website update has a pretty low cost. The result might provide a dopamine rush. The result might provide nothing, or even a negative result. Regardless, it’s addicting.
I found myself addicted to checking grades in college, even though the results were horrible 90% of the time.
Writing that the solution would be to stop using Facebook, Tumblr, and YouTube seems a little too black and white to me (I will provide a YouTube link at the bottom of this post). The main thing I wanted to contribute to this discussion is that all of this “addiction” is fueled by curiosity, which I would argue is inherently good. Let’s say that instead of being interested in corgi videos, or an extremely cute web series I found called Carbot StarCraft, you were interested in Fast Fourier Transform (I’m using that as an example because I’m not that interested in Fast Fourier Transform). Maybe you’d binge-watch a playlist of YouTube videos, read some Wikipedia articles, get more interested in signal processing. That would be kind of great, right?
If we crave new information so much, maybe we can channel that curiosity. Alternatively, maybe we should think about the form information is presented in. I personally got through most of college on YouTube videos, instead of textbooks, not so much because it’s more efficient to do that but because YouTube videos on the same content can be more interesting. To someone like me, surrounding myself with dense textbooks is like surrounding myself with some resource I don’t know how to mine. That’s definitely not true for other people. Some people are great at learning by reading nonfiction books front to back, or by reference.
That’s it for the ten-minute freewrite. Any thoughts on this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50R21mblLb0
