Social media becomes the crack cocaine of communications

cial media is the crack cocaine of the communications world.

It can be addictive, despite protests from social media users who swear they can give it up at any time. Similar promises can be heard from smokers, alcoholics and shopping junkies.

With social media users, I know many who check their smart phone or digital device dozens of times each day to replicate the same feel-good but fleeting chemical reaction in their brain. Just like with cocaine addicts I’ve interviewed. It’s all about the next hit or, in this case, the next click.

A neighbor of mine, who’s outspoken and opinionated, told me he doesn’t use any social media sites, especially Facebook, because he’s worried of getting sucked into its vortex of addiction. He’s retiring soon and, with much more time on his hands, he will likely get sucked in. It’s only a matter of time.

If you’re outspoken and opinionated like he is, social media can either be a blessing or a curse. Possibly both. On the same day. Maybe in the same post. I’ve seen it time and again on my many sites, which I manage each day with multiple posts.

I currently use a handful of social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, for a variety of reasons. I enjoy engaging readers, sometimes enraging readers, and continually prompting them to consider alternate viewpoints beyond their own.

I don’t care if they agree or not with my perspective. In fact, I prefer it when they don’t because their comments offer me a peek at someone else’s viewpoint, values and reasoning. Or the comments reveal someone else’s prejudices, biases and fears. Either way, it’s amusing or enlightening to me.

I also use social media as a sort of online focus group for different topics, from abortion and politics to racism and gay rights. A single post about any of these touchy subjects can generate dozens, or hundreds, of comments from readers across Northwest Indiana, or from across the country. It’s invaluable to me as a writer and amateur sociologist.

I also use Linked-In on a daily basis, for more professional reasons, mostly to share my newspaper columns with the digital world. Still, I’d rather initiate a constructive or entertaining conversation than read another professional’s resume, or offer them an obligatory compliment on their work anniversary. Ugh.

By far, my Facebook page attracts the most reader attention and feedback. It also attracts a peanut gallery of predictable characters whose comments sometimes verge on reprehensible. Through the years, I’ve had to block only a handful of social media users, typically for repeatedly using curse words or calling other people names.

I love a spirited online conversation. I hate spiteful name-calling and childish rebuttals.

One of my recent focus group-like posts was written specifically to illicit certain responses from social media followers. I was curious if they fit into certain “digital personalities” that emerge on these various sites, most notably Facebook.

I’ve compiled a list of these digital personalities, which seems to help categorize users while also possibly explaining their motivations to comment. This list includes the troll, the know-it-all, the instigator, the victim, the creeper and so on.

Full disclosure: I would probably be categorized as the instigator.

Even today, when a social media reader gets overly combative or hostile with me, I invite them to meet in person. Just like the old days, I believe. It would most likely end with a handshake, not a fistfight. They rarely take me up on it, though.

It’s very 21st century. It’s also very disappointing.

So we are instead stuck with digital discussions between people who’ve either forgotten or haven’t learned how to engage in a verbal, face to face conversation. Using civility, respect and social politeness while actually listening to someone else’s point of view.

This is especially true for the digital personality I call the “passive-aggressive sniper,” who seem to harbor a bipolar attitude on social media. In one comment, they come across as sullenly resistant. In another comment, they come across as hostile and vindictive, blaming others for their actions. Yikes.

The social media troll, on the other hand, habitually (and I purposely use that word) uses offensive and divisive comments on other people’s posts. One major difference between a troll and an instigator, I believe, is that a troll typically comments on other people’s posts, rather than generating a similar controversy on their own page.

A few names of my social media followers come to mind, but I don’t want to spread their venom into this column. Plus, if I did, the social media know-it-all would likely correct me, citing some footnote from a dusty policy manual to prove his or her point.

In many ways, you can get a pretty good idea who many of these digital personalities are in real life, away from the cloak of social media masking. Just like with old-fashioned verbal dialogues, all you have to do is allow them to talk, or to comment in this case. It doesn’t take too long to profile them.

Social media addiction is not only accepted as casual entertainment in our society, it’s so pervasive that we don’t realize it’s a problem. It’s like one alcoholic at a bar calling another one a drunk. Either they’re in denial or they’re too drunk to understand the irony.

For many social media users, it’s all about escapism, from their marriage, from their kids, from their troubles, from their lives. Trouble is, too often their choice of escapism from their life turns into, well, their life. Just ask any cocaine addict.

[Source:-Chicago Tribune]