Social Media in Today's Age: We are losing our free will

One of the things that makes us so unique and special as human beings is our free will. Of course, there is a determinism versus free will ongoing debate by a few but for now, let us all agree that for the most part, we are creatures who possess free will meaning; you are unimpededly free to choose different courses of action in your life. Free will mixed with our human nature is what makes us so beautiful but also dangerous. I say dangerous for many reasons, but for this article let's look at why it is dangerous within our phones. There is a great book called "Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now" by Jaron Lanier. Anyone who has watched the new documentary on Netflix called "Social Dilemma," which I highly suggest watching with your family, has seen him interviewed many times throughout the movie. He is a brilliant mind in the tech world and wrote a section in the book on social media and free will that really impacted me. When you are on your phone and on social media, you do not have the free will you think. Let me explain a little. We are dealing with advertisers who are using adaptive algorithms to essentially bend our free will. These algorithms are constantly learning about us and modifying what to put in front of us and how long to try and get us to comply with their will. Not ours. You see, this is one of the few industries in which we, meaning you and I, are the product. We are not the customer of social media. The customer is the advertiser. As to how the algorithms bend our will gets a little complicated but part of it has to do with the fact that both positive and negative feedback works, as does unpredictability. Our brains are wired to find patterns and when there is a random ad pushed to us that seems out of place, our brains will become subconsciously looking for a pattern hoping that a pattern will eventually appear. What this causes, believe it or not, is addiction. Another term for it is behavior modification. These ideas of how to get the brain hooked is what social media is trying to do. Engagement is everything and engagement is essentially how much time the social media companies can get you to spend on their platform with advertisers trying to break your free will. A long quote, my apologies, but a very important one to help explain this from Jaron Lenier in the book mentioned above: " When an algorithm is feeding experiences to a person, it turns out that the randomness that lubricates algorithmic adaptation can also feed human addiction. The algorithm is trying to capture the perfect parameters for manipulating a brain, while the brain, in order to seek out deeper meaning, is changing in response to the algorithm's experiments; it's a cat-and-mouse game based on pure math. Because the stimuli from the algorithm don't mean anything, because they genuinely are random, the brain isn't adapting to anything real, but to a fiction. That process - of becoming hooked on an elusive mirage - is addiction. As the algorithm tries to escape a rut, the human mind becomes stuck in one." So why am I writing this article specifically just about social media? Because I believe and have a lot of evidence to show it is doing the most damage to us within our phones. Instead of just writing a bunch of statistics like teenage girls are killing themselves now at over twice the rate since 2008, true by the way, I wanted to give you a glimpse into the fact that this pervasive technology is designed brilliantly to get you stuck in it. It is constantly adapting to bend your free will. As I said in the beginning of the article, free will is part of what makes us so special but human nature is what makes us so dangerous. When large companies started to realize they could bend our free will, that's when human nature took over. Remember, we are the product. We are money to those companies and advertisers. Free will is a beautiful gift and what makes us so special. Don't let anything take that away from you. I hope after reading this, you think about getting off social media entirely. My wife and I did a few months ago and we will never look back. Get your will back! Thank you for reading. Carll Burr is a Folsom resident and a monthly columnist in the Folsom Telegraph. He can be reached at burrcarll@gmail.com.