{"id":1775775,"date":"2022-12-15T07:47:29","date_gmt":"2022-12-15T12:47:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1775775"},"modified":"2022-12-15T07:47:35","modified_gmt":"2022-12-15T12:47:35","slug":"social-media-is-making-you-a-worse-person","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/social-media-is-making-you-a-worse-person\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Media Is Making You A Worse Person"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">16<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fsocial-media-is-making-you-a-worse-person%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1775775&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>What happens on social media doesn\u2019t stay there. After more than a decade of growth for platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, that much is undeniable. Social media has been sharply criticized for sucking attention away from the physical world and contributing to greater political polarization, but how it is changing our very selves \u2014 beyond compelling us to buy things, shortening our attention span, or causing our brains to offload the storage of literal memories to social media \u2014 receives far less attention. The so-called \u201ccrisis of character\u201d acknowledged by pundits across the political spectrum overlaps greatly with the crisis of social media dependence. Social media use should be seen as a self-modification project, and one in which we become worse people.<\/p>\n<p>In her <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Weaponization-Loneliness-Tyrants-Isolation-Silence-ebook\/dp\/B0BL86TPWD\/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+weaponization+of+loneliness&#038;qid=1670437403&#038;s=digital-text&#038;sprefix=the+weaponiza%2Cdigital-text%2C167&#038;sr=1-1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">new book<\/a>, \u201cThe Weaponization of Loneliness,\u201d Stella Morabito discusses how we use social media to feel connected, even though this connection isn\u2019t the kind we actually need. It\u2019s a \u201cpseudo-intimacy\u201d that \u201cpreys on our loneliness, leading us into the arms of social engineers who hope to mold our thoughts.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>These \u201cvarious forms of pseudo-intimacy\u201d achieved on social media, such as celebrity fandom and status-building, \u201care exploitable.\u201d We\u2019re the loneliest people perhaps in human history, and social media is leveraging that to keep us building mostly superficial connections in the virtual world.<\/p>\n<p> Destroying Self-Regulation <\/p>\n<p>What happens when we don\u2019t have strong personal relationships in real life and become dependent on these shallow \u201csubstitute\u201d connections forged on social media? \u201cWe lose our ability to self-regulate when we feel socially disconnected,\u201d says Morabito, citing the work of authors John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick. A worse ability to emotionally self-regulate translates to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.healthline.com\/health\/emotional-self-regulation#about-emotional-self-regulation\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">worse behavior<\/a>: Among the effects are greater impulsiveness, less empathy, and more anger. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>What should seriously concern us about social media, then, is not just the addictive nature of it, which keeps us from looking up at the real world and connecting with it (the intake side of the equation), but how our output of content in social media apps, aimed at getting more and more of those \u201cfriends\u201d and followers, has the power to recreate us as people.<\/p>\n<p> Curating One\u2019s Persona <\/p>\n<p>Obviously, our increasingly polarized perceptions influence the things we say and don\u2019t say. But that constant feedback from likes, reposts, and replies isn\u2019t just keeping us in the app \u2014 it\u2019s remaking us into a persona that is more optimized for social media and therefore less optimized for real life. The online persona may be perfectly retouched and carefully curated in biographical information and hashtags, but it\u2019s more prone to outrage and trolling, less empathetic, less patient, more narcissistic, and more of a stranger-pleaser. It\u2019s more prone to self-censoring and more prone to constructing a narrative about one\u2019s life that isn\u2019t necessarily accurate or helpful but earns more kudos, sympathy, and admiration on social media.\u00a0And I know from personal experience, particularly during bouts of heavy social media use, that these traits aren\u2019t confined to my online profile. They bleed into how I<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Through a constant feedback loop of likes, comments, and reposts, social media is reconstructing our personas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":660,"featured_media":1775778,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546],"tags":[6919,4188,3892,5127,8155],"class_list":["post-1775775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist","tag-federalist","tag-media","tag-person","tag-social","tag-worse"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1775775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/660"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1775775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1775775\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1775778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1775775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1775775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1775775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}