Says the psychologist Yulia BrailovskayaFrom the Center for Mental Health Research and Treatment at the University of Ruhr, Bochum, that Smartphone And the rest of the Internet access devices are “Both blessing and cursing“. According to a report by the FAD Youth Foundation, it is a fundamental and daily communication tool (84.1%), information retrieval (83.6%) and leisure (79.9%). But, Like any tool, you need an instruction manual That ignorance can lead to stress, addiction, unrealistic images, frustration, loss of self-esteem, impaired physical activity, isolation and misinformation, leading to worldviews and decision making. According to experts participating in the documentary Like / dislikeProduced by Funcas and Deer Watson Films of the Center for Economic and Social Research, the technology is there and the solution is not to ignore it, but to know how to use it.

This is a documentary Like / Dislike

Brailovskaya, lead author of the study Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Points to the first measure: “It is not necessary to give up a cell phone for the better. It should be optimal for daily use. ” According to the results of this work, Those who reduce their use to at least one hour a day note improvements In prosperity.

But reducing usage time is clearly a temporary, partial, inadequate and ineffective solution, since Internet use is integral. The most important thing is to know how it works when using it and what effect it gives. A group from Yale University has published a study Advances in science In which he identifies the perverted mechanism of social media, which, according to Molly Crockett, co-author of the Department of Psychology and the work, “platforms reflect what is happening in society, but they also create a stimulus that changes the way users respond over time.”

The more polarized it gets, the more approval it gets

In this way, the research reflects How can networks be a source of social good? Motivate collaboration, stimulate change, or promote reprimands for certain addictions (such as machismo or xenophobia). But also, according to the authors, “it has a dark side, Promoting harassment of minority groups“Dissemination of disinformation and political polarization.”

The perverse effect leading from one side to the other, according to this study, is based on the fact that Users whose opinions are more shared or more liked are users with less constructive discourse. Users will discover this bias, and Crockett says “moderate groups can become radicalized over time.”

Another experiment in this direction, conducted by New York University and published Nature Communications, Simulated a social network And found that those who received more reactions were more likely to post more. “Our findings may help us better understand why social networks dominate the daily lives of so many people, and they may also provide clues to ways to overcome excessive behavior on the Internet,” said Bjorn R. Lindstrom of the University of Amsterdam and lead author of the study. article.

These two experiments address the causes of greater dependence on networks and How to condition a publishedWhich carries more adhesion and reaction than ordinary communication and even if it is not real.

In this regard, actress Martha Etura, who starred in the documentary Like / dislike Without filters and with the most natural image, he explains: “Social media has a part I do not like: just showing what is beautiful. Society tends to classify feelings as good or bad, beautiful or ugly and urges us to create a parallel reality that is not real and can cause confusion when a person is in an unprotected place or in a developmental phase, such as adults.