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Three Duke students are researching the effects of technology on the mental health of college students. They discuss how smartphones and social media are designed to be addicting, and how this addiction is tied to the attention economy business model. They also explore the relationship between social media and mental health disorders, finding correlations between smartphone use and depression, anxiety, stress, and self-esteem. The students argue that smartphones have a negative effect on mental health and academic performance, and discuss the concept of the "happiness effect" on social media. University presidents acknowledge the detrimental effects of social media but do not take action. Hello. Welcome to the first episode of our podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Maria. I'm Claire. I'm Michael. We're Duke students looking into the idea of technology and mental health in college. As college students, we live in highly technological environments. Our IDs, food points, class page access, and more are all on our phones. As such, college students tend to use their phones a lot. In 2014, so 10 years of technology spread ago, about 86% of undergraduate college students owned a smartphone. I estimate that at Duke in 2024, this number is very close to 100%. As such, we're doing a dive into the effects of our technology on the mental health of college students like us. Looking into why we use it, what it costs us, and how that specifically can impact universities and university students. Our research comprises a literature review and interviewing students at Duke on their relationships to technology. You should listen to this podcast because it's likely that you have some relationship to technology. And whether you're a college student or not, many of our results are applicable to the general population. According to the Pew Research Study, 46% of smartphone users say they couldn't live without their phones. Why do we view this way? The reason for this is that technology like smartphones and social media have a form of designed addiction baked into them. Specifically, a type of addiction that taps into what can biologically hook our brain. A retro report on PBS discusses that this aspect of technology design has origins in behavioral psychology research done on animals in the 60s. One result from behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner was that our brains react well to unpredictable payoffs. You know, when you're scrolling on your Instagram page and it seems like videos you really like are interspersed with the main ones, that is an unpredictable payoff and it makes you less likely to click off because the next video could be really great. This variable reward, among other aspects, is the hook designed into the product in modern technology like social media. Here's a topic tied to philosopher Marshall McLuhan's ideas on what is significant about a technology. McLuhan's argument is that what is significant about a technology isn't specifically the message it carries, meaning the content we see from it or what we typically associate with it. What's significant about technology is what it's doing in the sense that how is it changing our behavior in society by being present in society? What underlying networks run and supply this technology? For social media, McLuhan would say, and we agree, that the significance of social media is this hook. The fact that there is a multi-billion dollar industry where companies are designing a nation and worldwide addiction to their product is the significance of it. One driving force of this problem is that social media is designed around the attention economy business model. An attention economy is when being able to have the attention of users corresponds to higher revenue, making it a good to be acquired. This model of social media strongly incentivizes them to be as addictive as possible because they make money on how much time we spend on our app, looking at the ads, for example, and the aspects of this are questionable and discussed in an article by Bhargava and Velazquez. Essentially, social media is a particularly exploitative kind of addiction. As well, quote, cigarettes do not change themselves to become more addictive for each particular smoker. Social media does. The curated, for-you pages is just a result of data collection on you to make it more addicting to you. It adds insult to injury as the user is designing their own material of addiction while the supplying party profits. The authors describe the situation with social media in the form of vulnerabilities, the markers of an addiction that exploits users. The first kind of vulnerability has to do with the explicit the algorithms are designed to be addictive to you. The second comes from the user being vulnerable to the influence of social media due to its sheer pervasiveness in society. An addiction can be reignited by environmental cues, i.e. exposure to it in day-to-day life. While other addiction cues can be easier to avoid, the social media cue is basically impossible to avoid. To quote the authors, It also ties into questions of privacy, as to create the specific addiction material that companies require a lot of data on. It also ties into questions of privacy, as to create the specific addiction material that companies require a lot of data on the user. Shoshana Zuboff calls the idea of a data collection economy surveillance capitalism. In her work on the matter, she discusses that companies collect a large amount of data from us as their business model relies on it. Not only that, other aspects of behavioral psychology research ties in in the form of behavioral manipulation. In short, not only are there companies designing their product to be as addicting as possible, they are adding an aspect of trying to actively change your behavior so you don't stop using the app. For a case study, try to cancel your Facebook account. It's crazy. There's also significant ties between this addiction and current philosophical work on living in an information-driven world. Specifically, the work by Liangshu Han goes over the idea of living in an information or content-driven society. Han argues that our brains can't linger on this information for long, so it's always going for more and more of it. The constant stream of content, like social media, the news, and television, is making us addicted to it. Because contemporary life is overcome with this information, we are creating a society that perpetuates the information addiction that the social media companies have carefully curated. It's a positive feedback loop between the actions of the big actors, tech companies, and overall society. In short, social media companies depend on us being addicted to them, and so they use specialized research to make themselves as addicting as possible. The fact that they are so widely used and our society is developing a culture of information addiction makes it impossible to escape. If you hire college students versus the billion-dollar addiction machine of social media, it isn't a fair fight. The psychological relationship between mental health and social media is complex, but we know that there are certain factors that influence mental health disorders the most. An article in the Journal of Affective Disorders conducted a review of 117 studies on mental health and smartphone use. They found that depression and anxiety were significantly positively correlated with smartphone use and that stress and self-esteem were mildly correlated with smartphone use. In addition, a journal article in the Cambridge Press found that certain aspects of social media had an effect on different types of mental health problems. The length of social media use seems to be the main factor for mood disorders, while the visual nature of social media seems to be the main factor in eating disorders. From our research, one thing is clear. Smartphones are bad for mental health. It is no mistake that these smartphones, and especially social media applications, have a chokehold on today's youth. This dependence has a negative effect on mental health. According to John D. Elhite, in problematic smartphone use, depression severity and anxiety severity are constantly related to smartphone addiction and high phone use. One glaring indicator that social media is causing mental health problems is the change in general attention span of college students. In the book, Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention, by Johan Hari, scientists discover that a student would switch tasks once every 65 seconds on average. Hari discusses how social media is a driving force of this attention span fall-off, as every social media platform is geared towards this minimal attention economy with short-form content. When talking about the effects of technology on students' academic performance, many students expressed their concerns about technology negatively affecting the academic performance of students around. This concern is valid and supported by scientific research conducted early in 2016. This study found out that not only is increasing use of smartphones correlated with lower GPAs, but it is also highly unlikely that students with a high rate of smartphone usage would achieve distinctive academic performance. Students say that their peers posting stuff about their glorious lives, which makes their lives. Students say that they see their peers posting stuff about their glorious lives, which makes their lives seem more dull in contrast. Consequently, they then also try to post the highlights of their lives to compete with others. Yes, this kind of struggle students are facing. According to Donna Frieda, it's called the happiness effect, which means that when the young generation feels pressured to post happy things on social media, they try to compete with their peers by posting content that shows they are happier than others. At Duke, the happiness effect has led to the culture of effortless perfection. Everyone seems to be effortlessly happy and perfect all the time on social media. Thus, peers around will feel burdened and appear perfect as well. The happiness effect can add to social media's deleterious effect on mental health through making people feel inferior and anxious about how others perceive them. One interesting result from the 2024 college president's survey is that when university presidents were proposing the drivers of increasing demand for mental health services, the prevalence of social media was pointed out as the most important driver, which had 86% of votes. So this means that although presidents know about the detrimental effects of social media, they refuse to take action against it in any institutionalized way. This perpetuates the idea that as a society, we're all addicted to this technology, even if we know it's causing problems. So to wrap up, we've covered the addiction of social media, how it affects our mental health, and Duke students' experience using social media. We found out that much of the setup of modern social media is designed to be biologically addictive based on behavioral psychological research. But oftentimes, we tend to be overly focused on the content of social media itself, and self-realized design addiction is faked into our smartphones. Our interviewees also shared their experience of how social media has affected their mental health. We found that many mental health problems are highly correlated with smartphone use. Specifically at Duke, social media addiction has negatively influenced our GPAs As we reflect on what we talked about today, we become more aware of how our smartphone addiction is affecting our mental health as well as our lives. As Byungchul Han mentioned in his work, communication has become a form of addiction and compulsion. When we think more about the embedded addiction and compulsion in modern social media, we may be concerned about our privacy, democracy, and collective health. It is better to be aware of these problems and take action now than later. As Shoshana Zuboff said, If we fail to take notice now, how long before we are numb to this incursion and to all the incursions? This is the end of our episode today. Thank you so much for listening, and we will see you next time.