The opportunity cost of social media

Social media has become a vital aspect of our day. If you are like me your day starts with social media and possibly ends with social media as well. In fact, I just checked the screen time metrics on my phone and found that I spent a whooping 6ish hours on my phone screen! Most of it on social media -

I literally spent close to 25% of my day browsing memes, liking photos and rejoicing TikTok trends.

I want to dissect the Good and the Bad of browsing through social media so that we can make an informed choice about it.

The good -

Immersive —

Social media applications are intentionally built to be immersive. Have you noticed that after 3 tiktoks or so, your hand is able to scroll past videos without your conscious decision. You are inside the app’s experience. I think this immersive state is super powerful! Imagine if we had such an immersive experience with education.

Intelligent —

I am an anime loving, fitness enthusiast who enjoys coding. (a mouthful intro, I know) Social media apps are able to correlate that and my interests, recent search history, current location and spending habits to curate an enticing list of videos/photos. Such an intelligent algorithm can be leveraged to learn pretty much anything…