The uses and abuses of social media
Social media has become a very important aspect of our daily lives. Nine years ago Facebook had around 175 million users (Kaplain & Haenlein, 2010) and Instagram, Whatsapp, and Snapchat were barely an idea. Nowadays Facebook has around 2.196 billion users (N.d., 2018). Social media has become engrained into society. Many people find it very hard to not check their phones every few minutes. This is because it has been scientifically proven that using social media releases dopamine, the feel good hormone, in to our system (Hosie, 2017). In her article in the UK newspaper The Independent, Hosie (2017) explains how the expectation of comments and likes on social media is what releases the dopamine. So what we get addicted to is not the actual rush of, say the comment you just received on your latest Instagram, but rather the anticipation of it - most of the time, actually reading that comment doesn’t live up to our expectations (Hosie, 2017). This reason, amongst others, ...