Is social media re-shaping our brains? Is it gaming us into short attention spans and an inability to think in complexity? The research suggests this is certainly happening. It also suggests it’s making us more angry and disconnected from one another.
The good news is there are ways to use social media as a tool without letting it hijack your mind and being.
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Transcript
Joe Martino: I hope you’re having a good day wherever you are and whatever time it is where you are. today we’re going to be talking about social media, sort of this desensitization that is occurring, within people, within our bodies, within our experience around us, our relationships, all this sort of stuff, and as well as a little bit of cultural decline and.
Joe Martino: How all of these things are sort of intermingled, interlinked, interconnected. as we look at this social media question and a little bit of the technological question that we’re faced with right now is, you know, is our relationship with social media unhealthy? How is it playing, playing into sort of the sense making crisis and the.
Joe Martino: Meaning crisis as we talked about in previous episodes? Because these things are connected. And when we’re, when we’re looking at humanity’s overall predicament, like what is happening and how do we solve so much of what is going on in a healthy way? we have to look at all of these things because they’re connected in some way or another.
Joe Martino: And the more we look at these different things, right, which is what we’re trying to do here, the more we kind of gain insight and awareness into how we might be able to re. Approach some of the challenges that we face with a little bit of a, Of a w, A more strategic understanding. Because if there’s one thing that’s kind of missing in our general society right now, it’s it’s this feeling of wisdom and this feeling of sort of.
Joe Martino: Spirit and sacredness to some extent.
Joe Martino: And I think it’s important to talk about how we can, how we can get back there a little bit. And no, doubt this discussion plays into that because social media has become something that while it can be a very useful tool, has sort of hijacked our minds, our consciousness and our way of being in a big way.
Joe Martino: And it doesn’t mean we necessarily need.
Joe Martino: To run completely away from it. there are ways to use it in a much healthier your way. But I really want to talk about how this story is playing into our existing moment of trying to figure out what’s going on. Because you know, we’re seeing this sort of I can’t watch content unless it’s like 15 seconds or otherwise, I’m getting bored or I can’t click on an article unless the headline is really.
Joe Martino: Really dramatic and shocking and breaking news.
Joe Martino: And this, that whatever, and how we’ve become sort of desensitized and Everything seems boring unless it’s really, really grabby. And there’s obviously a big challenge there that that needs to come to our awareness. I want to quickly as we talk about this, right, we’re talking about desensitization, we’re talking about sort of being hijacked, in our minds and in our consciousness. I want to Note that on November 28, 2022 I’m going to be relaunching my 5 days a you challenge, originally launched way back in 2012. many, many, many thousands of people have taken it over the course of time and I’ve been improving it and making it a really strong challenge, to sort of explore yourself is really what it is. It explores, you know, aspects of your mind, your habits, your state of being, your wellness in a sense. And through that typically, this challenge produces a really, really deep connection with self in just five days. And you’re going to be relaunching that. Haven’t done a launch of this I.
Joe Martino: Believe since about 2017 or 2018 maybe.
Joe Martino: So it’s been quite a while and I’ve been wanting to re release it and just never made the time to do it. But it’s going to be happening November 28, 2022. So if anything within this episode or any of the previous episodes has excited you to aspects of yourself a little further, you know, definitely keep note of this. You can sign up to our email list, and I’ll be kind of mentioning more clearly when this challenge is coming out. But with that said, I want to begin this one with a quote like one of the previous episodes. The real problem of humanity is the following.
Joe Martino: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and God like technology.
Joe Martino: And this comes from M. Dr. E.O. wilson. So what stands out to me in this particular quote is sort of this touch on these various aspects of human beings. Right. If we’re talking about medieval institutions, for example, it’s almost like we have these.
Joe Martino: Institutions that are not necessarily super evolved.
Joe Martino: And can be very heavy handed and may not take into consideration the totality of a human being and the.
Joe Martino: Spirit of a human and the emotions.
Joe Martino: Of a human and really seek to empathize with that. instead it just boom, let’s just go ahead and take out whatever the problem is, in an aggressive way without really caring to understand how it’s interconnected into a lot of different ways. And of course when we’re talking about Paleolithic emotions, I believe he’s sort of touching upon Sort of these very primal emotions that humans have. And perhaps we don’t have a sense of emotional mastery as well. And therefore those primal emotions can be, manipulated very easily. They could be something that makes our experience very beautiful, but also something that we can be manipulated through. And so to solve that is almost this deep awareness that needs to come. And, then the God like technology.
Joe Martino: Of course, is like handing machine guns.
Joe Martino: To three year old kids at a playground and saying, okay, have fun with this, and then being surprised when somebody kills one another.
Joe Martino: Right.
Joe Martino: We’re dealing with technology that is, perhaps beyond what humanity’s wisdom is. And I say that almost tongue in cheek because I think to some extent we absolutely are dealing with technologies that are beyond what are capable wisdom and emotional intelligences as beings. And, I think this is why.
Joe Martino: We’Re ending up in so many unhealthy situations with technology.
Joe Martino: So I thought this was a great quote to begin this.
00:05:00
Joe Martino: And, where I want to go with this now is just, you know, social media is obviously a public square. It is something that, you know, we utilize, like it or not, for a very meaningful purpose in life.
Joe Martino: And at, the same time as.
Joe Martino: I say that, it has become something that is hijacking our ability to make sense of things. It is hijacking our emotions, it is hijacking our consciousness, it is hijacking our.
Joe Martino: Reward centers in our brain and almost.
Joe Martino: Making us addicted and sort of mindless and on autopilot when we use these technologies. But it is that public square. It does have that, that moment where.
Joe Martino: Like it or not, we put something.
Joe Martino: Out online on social media and it is a way that we spread important information. Is it a way that we interact.
Joe Martino: And make sense of what’s happening with.
Joe Martino: Our world and understand what’s going on around us? You know, I know sometimes, for example, in the alternative space, it can be like, you know, I can’t believe the last two years with COVID how.
Joe Martino: Insane it has been and how much.
Joe Martino: People have been unable to sort of.
Joe Martino: Come to the same understandings that I.
Joe Martino: Have about what’s going on with COVID Right.
Joe Martino: This is a thought and a feeling.
Joe Martino: A lot of people have had. And I would just ask the question, how did you even learn the alternative perspectives of what was going on with COVID You learned probably the vast majority of it through social media. Why is there such an outrage about the, censorship on social media? Because people know that this provides a.
Joe Martino: Meaningful tool that is very important for us.
Joe Martino: And while it, you know, understandably so we can argue as well that hey, it doesn’t really matter. The amount of things that we, we focus on on social media, most of them don’t matter. And I think that’s also true. There is a lot of distraction, there’s a lot of noise, there’s a lot of unnecessary, sort of engagement that we’re playing with on social media. But there still a deep value and a deep purpose there if we want to make meaningful decisions in our lives and sort of live somewhat of a modern life. I know there’s a lot of people who enjoy the idea of just kind of going back to the land and just living with very, very local community, and perhaps that’s a life for you. But you know, I personally feel that as a global community, we’re in a.
Joe Martino: Modern society, we have incredible human potential.
Joe Martino: We have incredible ways of living and advancing, as a species to do incredible things in very healthy ways. and I’m curious to embrace that. I’m curious to explore that and not just kind of go back to a way of life or a way of living that was, you know, way, way back, thousands of years ago. so to me it’s about how can we look at our technologies, how can we look at the things that we’re doing and bring a different way of being, a different way of consciousness, and perhaps even different incentive structures associated with those so that we can use them properly. Because there’s multiple layers as to why this social media problem, has gotten out of control. So one of the key things in looking at social media, not technology as a whole, but just social media, is really looking at how these algorithms are built to produce mass personalization.
Joe Martino: Right?
Joe Martino: So you almost have this performative type culture of you know, if you’re seeking, if you’re the creator of content, you’re seeking reward through the, like, through the.
Joe Martino: Comment, through the engagement.
Joe Martino: And you know, anytime you kind of have that reward seeking dopamine hit of, I put out this piece of content, hey, how are people responding to it? And as that begins to wear off, we start feeling like, well, let me either find something that’s going to give me that hit on social media again, or, or let me post something again that might give me that hit, that might give me that response. and this sort of creates this addictive sort of quality that when.
Joe Martino: You’Re talking now about the personalization piece.
Joe Martino: You have this, the content I’m looking for, the people that I’m engaging with and the stuff that I’m Putting out.
Joe Martino: All continues to sort of funnel down.
Joe Martino: Into this highly personalized echo chamber of everything that we’re seeing.
Joe Martino: Everything that we’re exploring is typically going.
Joe Martino: To continue to inform us and what we already believe and really lock in our existing, beliefs. Because the incentive structure of the way social media works is that they want people to be happy on social media and to have their attention, held.
Joe Martino: Right.
Joe Martino: And to make it feel like, you know, they’re having this sort of addictive relationship of, you know, everything I’m seeing on here is just making me feel in essence like it’s reconfirming how I feel and it’s making me feel like I’m right all the time. So I’m going to stay on this. This becomes a good relationship for me.
Joe Martino: Right.
Joe Martino: And this is how our consciousness and our attention sort of gets high hijacked, as we use social media and you know, you kind of see this when you look at, say, Covid, for example, you could certainly find on Twitter or, and I know this happened to me, for example, you could, if.
Joe Martino: You start looking into, do masks, you.
Joe Martino: Know, prevent COVID 19. you know, you could, you could start seeing that for the next like three or four days. Yes, they do. Yes they do. Here’s more studies, more studies, more posts, more Porsche, more post. Like anything that kind of continues to confirm that reality. You’ll get that until you sort of stop and do a completely different search. Do masks, you know, not prevent COVID 19. And then for the next like five or six days, that’s all you’re gonna see on your social media feed is no, they don’t. No they don’t.
Joe Martino: They don’t work.
Joe Martino: They don’t work. Right. And that can continue down
00:10:00
Joe Martino: and down and down and down until you sort.
Joe Martino: Of manually disrupt the pattern and go.
Joe Martino: Look for something different.
Joe Martino: So the algorithm will often keep producing.
Joe Martino: Exactly what you think already until you sort of snap out of it manually, go start seeking different things, and then it’ll just take you down that pathway for a little while. And, this produces one of the.
Joe Martino: Big issues when it comes to social.
Joe Martino: Media and sense making, relating it back to, the previous episode is that we can very easily get lost in not manually checking both sides of a discussion. Because, who’s going to necessarily do that when their algorithm sort of feels like it’s just showing them the same.
Joe Martino: Thing over and over and over again?
Joe Martino: Well, that must be right. and so this sort of manual disruption, it becomes necessary yet isn’t Done by, I don’t think a whole lot of people. And when we’re talking, talking about, well, you know, as I mentioned before, you know, Twitter or Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube.
Joe Martino: Even Google as a search engine, these.
Joe Martino: Should be in a sense public squares.
Joe Martino: These should be, I can hear all.
Joe Martino: These different perspectives, but the I guess the social media engines themselves are not incentivized to do this because as I mentioned before, they, they’re incentivized to sort of keep everybody addicted to their.
Joe Martino: Platforms and keep everybody on their platforms.
Joe Martino: That is how they’re going to make money. That is how they’re going to keep attention.
Joe Martino: The attention becomes the currency.
Joe Martino: So they’re not incentivized to actually show.
Joe Martino: You a breadth of content that might.
Joe Martino: Make you upset, that might make you argue and disagree with people, that might make you feel as though you don’t know what’s true. You feel confused, you feel, I don’t even know how to make sense of this stuff anymore. It’s easier, it’s more advantageous for them to keep it really, really, really simple.
Joe Martino: And to keep giving you what you want over and over and over again.
Joe Martino: Because they’re trying to make more money.
Joe Martino: Right?
Joe Martino: That’s what they’re, the underlying economic system of our society is designed such that everybody needs to kind of keep the bottom line growing. They need to keep, you know, their stock, their shareholders happy.
Joe Martino: Right.
Joe Martino: And so that’s driving this gaming, this, this addiction of getting people to get stuck on social media. So once you’re left with that and you’re, the attention is being held and now you have these bad algorithms, you can’t just turn around and say, well, these social media companies are just, they’re just flat out evil. Well, you could make an argument that they have, you know, they’re not operating off of the best ethics. But at the same time it’s like our underlying economic systems are literally pushing them to take that behavior. It’s pushing them to make those decisions. So it almost becomes impossible to talk about how do we improve our social media, sort of experience and what they’re doing without having the discussion of, well, look at the underlying economic system. Look at what, look at what’s driving this behavior. Look at what’s driving these companies to want to make more and more money and to have more and more and more control over, their users attention.
Joe Martino: Right.
Joe Martino: It’s literally a huge driving factor. So we have to keep that as a piece to this puzzle when we’re talking about solving this challenge. and of course, as our attention sort of becomes, you know, enthralled in this and as our reward centers, you know, the relationship in our brain between.
Joe Martino: Social media dopamine and seeking that reward.
Joe Martino: Of that like, or that really, you know, crazy piece of content, or that really dramatic piece of content or, you know, trying to get feedback from.
Joe Martino: Other people around us.
Joe Martino: As all that sort of gets hijacked and our use of technology becomes sort of very autopilot automatic, we start to.
Joe Martino: Get desensitized to other things around us.
Joe Martino: That are suddenly become very boring, right?
Joe Martino: And we see this with, you look.
Joe Martino: At a user and they can’t seem.
Joe Martino: To respond to a very good, meaningful piece of content unless it has this.
Joe Martino: Extremely aggressive, you know, shocking headline associated with it.
Joe Martino: And on one hand we’re complaining that.
Joe Martino: It’S like, oh, you know, news and media has all these, you know, aggressive headlines, yet we only respond to them. We don’t respond to the simple, meaningful, well thought out content that’s out there. We typically will respond to stuff that is a little bit more like a tabloid these days.
Joe Martino: And a lot of this plays into.
Joe Martino: How social media is sort of hijacking our attention. and then this of course feeds.
Joe Martino: Into that sense making crisis at the.
Joe Martino: End of the day, because good high quality stuff is not necessarily what we seek.
Joe Martino: We’re just seeking whatever’s the most dramatic thing.
Joe Martino: So I kind of wanted to talk about a few studies, a few key points here that really outline and give us some facts into what is happening on social media. So this first one is a study out of the Journal of Communication and.
Joe Martino: It showed that 75% of content is viewed for less than one minute on social media. More specifically, it shows that on average, people switch between pieces of content every 19 seconds. In this study, participants experienced a neurological.
Joe Martino: High whenever they switched between content, explaining.
Joe Martino: Why we feel driven to keep switching and underscoring how human biology makes us.
Joe Martino: Vulnerable to being manipulated by attention extractive economies.
Joe Martino: So again, we have this incentive structure.
Joe Martino: Which is looking to extract people’s attention,
00:15:00
Joe Martino: right?
Joe Martino: So now the algorithms are gamed to.
Joe Martino: Do so and we’re producing this person ultimately at the end of the day, who can’t pay attention for something with something for longer than 19 seconds because.
Joe Martino: We’Ve made it so easy to just.
Joe Martino: Keep, oh, switching between, switching between. And we get a high every time we do it because we’re seeking, oh, is this the thing that’s going to make us feel good? Is this the thing that’s going to make us feel good? So Our attention starts, to just fall away. And the more you become, you know.
Joe Martino: Offering a bit of a solution here, the more you become aware that this.
Joe Martino: Is what’s going on. And you kind of come out of.
Joe Martino: This autopilot mode a little bit when.
Joe Martino: You’Re on social media and you stop.
Joe Martino: Focusing on the 10 second reels or.
Joe Martino: The, you know, the 15 second reels all the time. And you actually sit down and watch a piece of content and start to feel like, hey, what’s going on in my body? What’s going on in my attention when it hits that 20, 30, 40 second mark?
Joe Martino: Why am I dying to bail out.
Joe Martino: Of this piece of content? Is it actually boring? Or have I just been trained that at, this amount of time I gotta bail, I gotta get outta here because I’m seeking something new, right? And so the becoming more present, becoming.
Joe Martino: More aware is a way for us.
Joe Martino: To kind of start looking at and understanding for ourselves. Is this happening to me? Am I sort of, you know, being affected by this? Because at the end of the day there’s also a sense making crisis within.
Joe Martino: This idea that we’re being gamed to.
Joe Martino: Have to switch a piece of content every 15 to 19 seconds because you know, we’re not going to be able to understand the complexity of any topic or any instance of something happening by looking at 15 to 19 seconds.
Joe Martino: Someone can take a five minute event, can pull out a 15 second clip.
Joe Martino: And make a situation seem very shocking, very, you know, crazy when if you actually looked at the whole clip, it’s a completely different story. And you know, I saw this way back in the day with the Covington kid. I don’t know if you remember that story, but you know, they showed this image that looked absolutely terrible. This like, you know, video of a boy, white boy, standing in front of a native who was, you know,
Joe Martino: Singing a song and banging on a drum. And it just made it look like this kid absolutely hated this guy.
Joe Martino: Media went crazy, it was all over mainstream media. And then you pull back and you say, oh, wow, hold on a second. This actually didn’t happen like this at all. It’s a completely different story.
Joe Martino: There’s so many more details here, right?
Joe Martino: And yet, you know, so many of the top influencers, oh, look how racist people are. Look at this, look at that, right? So it produced this massive cultural problem of when we get addicted to these 15 to 20 second videos and at.
Joe Martino: Becomes normal and then that becomes how we’re making sense of our reality through.
Joe Martino: These 15 to 19 second videos. We now create a crisis where we’re.
Joe Martino: Living off of things that didn’t really.
Joe Martino: Happen the way that we think they.
Joe Martino: Did, but it becomes normal to consume content that way.
Joe Martino: Another study here comes out of plus one. it showed that three months after starting to use a smartphone, users experience.
Joe Martino: A significant decrease in their mental arithmetic.
Joe Martino: Scores which indicates a reduction in their.
Joe Martino: Attention capacity and a significant increase in social conformity. Brain scans show that heavy users have significantly reduced neural activity in their right prefrontal cortex. A, ah, condition also seen in ADHD and linked with serious behavioral abnormalities such as impulsivity and poor attention.
Joe Martino: So what I found interesting about this.
Joe Martino: Is it’s just talking about the smartphone, but what do people do on their smartphone?
Joe Martino: For the vast majority of the time that they’re on their smartphone, they’re on social media. So there’s certainly a link to social media, as we’re looking at this particular study.
Joe Martino: And again we’re talking about poor attention.
Joe Martino: Spans, we’re talking about this impulsive, activity, we’re talking about our inability to really sort of make sense of things. And when I saw this question of.
Joe Martino: Social conformity, I had to look more.
Joe Martino: Deeply in the study. Like what are they talking about with social conformity? And it says, it leads to.
Joe Martino: Increased fear of social threats leading to high conformity and anxiety regarding social acceptance and approval.
Joe Martino: So people are seeing, okay, there’s things going on out there that within my society, within my community, and I’m afraid of not fitting into it because I won’t be accepted by people. So when you look at the way people are being bullied into saying the right things, when people are being bullied into, let’s say wearing a mask or.
Joe Martino: Taking a vaccine and their perspectives don’t.
Joe Martino: Matter anymore because they’re just being bullied, what you end up with is a whole bunch of people who may actually feel differently about something. But because of the way we’re sort.
Joe Martino: Of being gamed into social conformity, we’re.
Joe Martino: Just going along with what everybody else.
Joe Martino: Is saying and sort of staying quiet.
Joe Martino: Because there seems to be a relationship with that in how we use social media.
Joe Martino: So social media is in essence creating.
Joe Martino: More of this, in a sense more self righteousness along with pulling.
Joe Martino: A whole bunch of other people into.
Joe Martino: The self righteousness through this fear of not conforming to culture. So kind of a couple of really fascinating details in there. here’s another study I wanted to quickly look at and we know this a lot and very deeply because we saw
00:20:00
Joe Martino: this happen back in 2016.
Joe Martino: When algorithms started to deeply change.
Joe Martino: So this one also comes from plos One. and it showed that anger.
Joe Martino: Is the emotion that travels fastest and farthest on social media compared to all other emotions. As a result, those who get, who post angry messages will inevitably have the.
Joe Martino: Greatest influence and social media platforms will.
Joe Martino: Tend to be dominated by anger.
Joe Martino: So what I thought was interesting about this is our work since, you know, I would say 2009 to 2016 or so is kind of before the algorithms really changed, it would thrive quite easily, on social media just being. We have this very sort of, neutral tone emotion, meaning we’re not trying to utilize emotion to hijack people’s attention.
Joe Martino: Right?
Joe Martino: That’s what we mean with the way.
Joe Martino: That we, produce our media and the way we have all this time.
Joe Martino: Is we’re not trying to game people.
Joe Martino: Into believing what we believe by utilizing.
Joe Martino: Emotion, by utilizing anger. Instead, we’re leaving something on the table.
Joe Martino: And allowing people to explore it for.
Joe Martino: Themselves and explore what feelings come up for them as opposed to us trying.
Joe Martino: To rile them into a particular,
Joe Martino: You know, angry position or emotional position in general.
Joe Martino: so we saw this entirely that, you know, as social media algorithms.
Joe Martino: Started to change and it became a.
Joe Martino: Lot harder to actually reach people, the.
Joe Martino: Amount of anger and the amount of emotional hijacking actually increased.
Joe Martino: Because when you have an increase in.
Joe Martino: Let’S say, censorship and an increase in.
Joe Martino: Algorithms that don’t want to give everybody a fair opportunity, people begin to game those systems.
Joe Martino: And when they start gaming those systems.
Joe Martino: They start utilizing emotions because that is a, higher probability that you’re going to hijack somebody’s emotional state and consciousness so that something keeps spreading. So now by nature of the way these systems are functioning, by the way social media is functioning, they’re rewarding, less well thought out, content.
Joe Martino: They’re rewarding content that is riling people.
Joe Martino: Up into emotions that is spreading anger.
Joe Martino: All over the place in a very uncontained way.
Joe Martino: Now it’s okay to feel angry about something that’s going on in our world, and it’s okay to feel an emotion in general about something that’s going on in our world. But when it becomes the only emotion that people are seeing out there all the time, it starts to change our baseline into not only how often that we see anger and how we, how we deal with anger, but also what we’re supposed to do with that anger.
Joe Martino: Right?
Joe Martino: It becomes normal to just be angry all the time.
Joe Martino: Right?
Joe Martino: And of course this will burn us out.
Joe Martino: This will make it so that we.
Joe Martino: Don’T want to communicate with each other. Like it has a ton of effects, in terms of what’s going to go on. as opposed to sort of, I watch piece of content, maybe I feel a little bit of anger from what might be happening in that piece of content because it relates to a social issue that I care about. I, you know, effectively process that anger, you know, outside of, in a contained way, outside of social media. And then once I’ve sort of allowed that what can be a, sometimes a very destructive energy, to sort of.
Joe Martino: Be processed and move through me, I.
Joe Martino: Now, from a more wiser and settled place can still talk about this issue on social media, in a way that is not going to produce so much potential destruction through anger. So this would be a much healthier way of us utilizing this sort of life energy that does arise within us when we do feel anger. but again, going back to that quote at the beginning of this episode, we’re talking about having these medieval, sorry, these Paleolithic emotions that are being hijacked by this God like technology. And this is what’s at play here is we don’t have sort of this healthy relationship with anger, within ourselves and in our bodies. And we feel so often that anger is the thing that’s going to change the world. We need to utilize, we need to.
Joe Martino: We need to spew our anger all.
Joe Martino: Over social media and just, you know, see what happens. I would just ask you if you still believe that to be true as opposed to processing anger in a healthy way. Look at the state of social media. Is it healthy, right? Is it producing change? Is it producing good results? Or is it just people angry all over the place in some cases? And is that anger uniting people? Is that anger connecting people?
Joe Martino: Is that anger getting meaningful attention?
Joe Martino: Or is it just getting sort of automatic, robotic like attention and creating more divides, more polarization? Because that’s what the anger will do, is produce greater polarization all over the place. So even when people complain, oh, well, you know, the role of the elite is to, you know, divide and conquer the masses. I would throw back and I’d say by you being angry and destructive all the time on social media, are you not playing into the polarization? Are you not dividing the masses as well?
Joe Martino: Right.
Joe Martino: So again, the anger is not bad. It’s about knowing how to utilize and process our anger in a healthy way and then show up to the public.
Joe Martino: Square and discuss in a different Manner.
Joe Martino: Right.
Joe Martino: And that’s kind of more so how we can approach this because again, the anger is just hijacking our, our use of social media and the system itself is producing a reward for being angry. So not a good combination.
00:25:00
Joe Martino: Another, study here from the Proceedings.
Joe Martino: Of National Academy of Sciences showed that.
Joe Martino: The primary force behind whether someone will share a piece of information is not its accuracy or content, but because it comes from a friend or a celebrity with whom we want to be associated. We seem more concerned with status, popularity, and establishing a trust friends circle than with maintaining truth. Social media spaces become places where truth is downgraded.
Joe Martino: So I find this fascinating for, a number of different reasons, but ultimately that again, truth is not necessarily our goal, but really that it’s, it’s more. So I’m going to share something or believe something based on what celebrity might have also shared it or what my friends are kind of sharing. So we kind of keep that in group. Echo chamber. I want to be part of this, even if I don’t want to question what is actually being said more deeply. And this is obviously something we’ve dealt with a lot over the years because it seems like no matter what we.
Joe Martino: Put out in terms of content, we.
Joe Martino: Seem to be upsetting some group of people within our audience, which is fascinating because it’s like, because we’re trying to.
Joe Martino: Be as objective as we can.
Joe Martino: one day you’re saying something that some group of your audience really, really likes because they agree with it. And then because you’re now sharing a bit of the other side, that same group of the audience are now going to be pissed off because, know you’re challenging the perspective. It’s not as black and white. You’re starting to enter in nuance and.
Joe Martino: Seeking the truth on something.
Joe Martino: And that actually produces a situation where it’s like, oh, hold on, I don’t even know if I want to follow you anymore. I don’t even know if I agree with what you’re saying anymore. And a lot of times if we’re not aware of what’s playing out there, we actually just start sticking to whatever our audience agrees with because it’s easier for us to keep our friends and to keep, the people around us who we agree with, keep an audience of who you agree with. and in general, what this study is showing is that we’re kind of taking notice from what the crowd is doing or what a popular celebrity is doing. And if, unless we have come to hate them for some reason, usually because our own friend Circle, or our own, you know, celebrity circle that we listen to, hates that person over there.
Joe Martino: Then we start hating that person over.
Joe Martino: There without even really understanding why, whatever, without even really questioning what is the truth in this situation here. so again, this idea of truth.
Joe Martino: Seeking is being thrown out the window.
Joe Martino: Because the truth doesn’t matter as much.
Joe Martino: As agreeing with whatever majority we want.
Joe Martino: To associate ourselves with. And when you start seeing the amount of celebrities, the amount of, you know, really high level comedians, really high level individuals that were not in news and.
Joe Martino: Media but were in movies or in.
Joe Martino: Music or in all these different things, and now these celebrities, celebrities are making their way into the news and information landscape. What starts to happen is a whole other layer of this where people are now, having a much, much harder time really navigating what’s true and what’s not. Because now their favorite celebrity might be talking about things that kind of.
Joe Martino: Agree with what their ears are already used to hearing.
Joe Martino: So this makes this, this challenge, even more difficult. But at the end of the day, good content, really good objective research is not necessarily what is rewarded on social media these days. What’s rewarded is a celebrity voice, a you know, very powerful, you know, somebody who’s, who’s seen by a lot of people as, hey, this guy always.
Joe Martino: M, has it right, or this group.
Joe Martino: Of people always has it right, or what our immediate friend circle is saying. And so obviously there’s a problem here with, with general sense making, in a big way.
Joe Martino: And of course it’s changing our social.
Joe Martino: Behaviors, pretty much as a whole. So I hope that kind of gives a little bit of an indication as to some various factors at play.
Joe Martino: Of course, there’s many, many more factors.
Joe Martino: Right.
Joe Martino: We also know that social media in.
Joe Martino: General is being hijacked by you know, government agencies where they’re collaborating to.
Joe Martino: Censor and to control narratives. Even in the West.
Joe Martino: Right. We saw that recently, in the United States where, you know, they’re number of. The Department of Homeland Security was meeting with a number of different social media, I guess companies to control narratives.
Joe Martino: Right.
Joe Martino: And so that’s a whole other issue to this. But the general point is that the.
Joe Martino: More sort of pieces to this puzzle that we can begin to understand that are playing out, the more we can become aware, within ourselves, the more we’re going to have a clear understanding of how to approach this and potentially, fix some of these challenges, because we can’t be hijacked as easily.
Joe Martino: When we are more embodied when we.
Joe Martino: Are more aware, when you make somebody aware of a magic trick, for example, as somebody who’s done, you know, a lot of magic throughout the course of my life, when, so when you teach somebody the magic trick, you know, they no longer see the magic. It’s, it’s now like they know exactly.
Joe Martino: What to look for. And the more sleight of hand you.
Joe Martino: Learn, the more pieces of deception that you learn, the less, the more you’re able to determine what’s going on in any magic trick.
Joe Martino: Right?
Joe Martino: So you’re, as a magician, you’re increasing.
Joe Martino: Your ability to understand where the deception is and it actually ruins magic for you.
Joe Martino: Right.
Joe Martino: And this same thing is happening.
Joe Martino: The more you become aware of what.
Joe Martino: How you’re being gamed by social media, of how you’re being gamed by government narratives,
00:30:00
Joe Martino: of how you’re being gamed by.
Joe Martino: You know, even just news sources in general and the way people talk about things, the more you realize how to become embodied and how to really pay attention to, you know, understanding people’s biases or where they’re coming from, the more you’re going to have a, ah, clearer understanding of not being sucked in or manipulated by, these different pieces and being able to truth seek, and make sense of what’s going on.
Joe Martino: Around us a lot better.
Joe Martino: So that’s really what the awareness will do. but in essence, sort of to wrap this up a little bit, I just want to finalize with a little bit of discussion on desensitization and sort, of this cultural decline. If, if all of these things are happening and we’re losing our attention span and we’re unable to sort of find.
Joe Martino: Interest in things unless they are very flashy.
Joe Martino: Look at how a lot of YouTube videos are edited. Somebody will say something for 10 seconds and then there’ll be a cut. Sometimes it’s five seconds and there’ll be a cut.
Joe Martino: And you just have these cuts all the time.
Joe Martino: Cuts, cuts, cuts.
Joe Martino: And these cuts keep pulling our attention back in over and over and over again.
Joe Martino: A lot of flashy things going on. you know, sometimes the cut will be moved backwards, then move forwards and then, you know, you’re just, your, your, your eyes are always kind of having.
Joe Martino: To readjust and your attention is always being regathered and you’re never really able.
Joe Martino: To get deep into what this person is saying. But you stay watching the piece of content because it is keeping you in.
Joe Martino: This sort of lulled state of attention.
Joe Martino: Not necessarily really pay attention to what’s going on. So what this does is it hijacks our attention span, but doesn’t necessarily give us the depth of understanding that we.
Joe Martino: Would want from a piece of content.
Joe Martino: and most videos on social media these days are like this, right? Even on TikTok, like these videos, this is how it functions.
Joe Martino: So it’s training our brain to not be able to pay attention to something that is longer.
Joe Martino: So if you get into a five minute video where it’s not constant cuts all the time and it’s just somebody talking, you get bored. Not because you’re actually bored, but because your brain is telling you, wow, this is boring. Because these other things over here were a lot flashier, right? So we become desensitized to just normal life.
Joe Martino: Life, right?
Joe Martino: When you walk around nature, when you.
Joe Martino: Walk around, you know, life in general, there’s not cuts going on, there’s not flashiness going on. you orient with your reality, really look around the room. It’s a beautiful thing that we’ve come to see as something that is, ah, ah, this is boring. There’s nothing going on here, right? Because we become so desensitized. And this reminds me of a beautiful scene in a movie called Peaceful Warrior, which is based on a book. And in the scene the guy, you know, he looks around this park,
Joe Martino: And his mentor says, you know, do you see it?
Joe Martino: Or whatever? And he’s like, what?
Joe Martino: I don’t see anything. There’s nothing going on.
Joe Martino: Meanwhile, there’s like people playing and people doing different things and the birds are chirping, whatever. And then, you know, his mentor basically grabs his head and it sort of sends him into this like hyper present state of seeing all the very minor details. The beauty of really what’s happening in his environment, the small, you know, bug moving, you, know up a leaf or something like that, like all these tiny details. And then at the end of it he goes, there’s never nothing going on. and the idea here is that.
Joe Martino: We have become so desensitized to real.
Joe Martino: Life that we can’t see anymore what really is happening in our reality, both on social media as well as just in our natural environment around us. We’ve become so entrained to see filters and these fast cuts and these, these.
Joe Martino: Five second clips and these 10.
Joe Martino: And if we’re not, if something we’re watching doesn’t make us laugh, then it’s not worth watching, right? We’ve become gamed, we’ve become desensitized by social media in such a big way that we’re missing out on the quality of life. We’re missing out on the qualities that.
Joe Martino: Are in the tiny little little things.
Joe Martino: We can’t even read a book as easily anymore, on average as people without feeling well, this practice is boring. This particular thing I’m doing is boring. Right. so we have to kind of look at that because ultimately what this is doing is it’s leading to a cultural decline.
Joe Martino: Right?
Joe Martino: If we’re, if our attention span is going, if our ability to think more deeply about things is going, if our.
Joe Martino: Ability to watch a 15 minute video.
Joe Martino: Is dying, if our ability to sit.
Joe Martino: And pay attention to something that is an action movie, for example, over and.
Joe Martino: Over and over again, then we’re starting to miss out on the beauty and.
Joe Martino: The sacredness and the spirit and the.
Joe Martino: Soul of what’s happening in our reality. And that is going to create a decline in our culture. Because just like social media rewards flashy.
Joe Martino: Not necessarily good behavior and good content, that’s then what we’re going to start.
Joe Martino: To reward out in our regular world. So artists who produce beautiful works, that don’t get endorsed by some celebrity won’t be appreciated. Whereas you can have a piece of art that didn’t require that, you know, level of mastery that is endorsed by some celebrity just because, and everyone’s gonna love it because they were told to do so. And we wouldn’t know the difference between the depth and the skill and the.
Joe Martino: Talent involved and the emotion involved in.
Joe Martino: The art because we’re desensitized from that level
00:35:00
Joe Martino: of depth and that level of.
Joe Martino: Sort of beauty and spirit and soul.
Joe Martino: So there’s a deep relationship between the social media hijacking and the general cultural decline that we’re seeing, around us. And the way out of it is going back to it, becoming aware of this stuff, becoming embodied again, becoming, you know, developing a healthier relationship with social media so that we can not only make sense of our reality better, as we discussed previously in the episode, but that we can appreciate life and what’s really going on in a way that that brings back that sacredness, that soul and that spirit, in a much more deep way. And, before I cap this off, I just want to say one more time. November 28, 2022.
Joe Martino: I’m going to be relaunching the five days of you challenge, which is a little bit of an introduction into some.
Joe Martino: Practices that will help us sort of start to do this, just detach a little bit from the nature of this social media hijacking and get into a more embodied, more present state, more self aware state, so we can almost start.
Joe Martino: Learning the tricks behind the magic so.
Joe Martino: That the, that the magic itself, and I’m using an analogy here that makes it seem like we’re not going to see the magic in life anymore, but in essence we’re actually going to see the magic in life, but we’re going to be more aware of the deception and the manipulate, manipulation, which is what it’s all about at the end of the day. So I hope there’s some clarity here in terms of what I’m trying to talk about with regards to social media and how it plays into this overall predicament we’ve been talking about, over the last few episodes.
Joe Martino: Thanks, so much for tuning in. It’s been great to hear from you.
Joe Martino: Guys about the relaunch of this, podcast and, we’ll catch you next time. Well, that’s it, that’s all. I hope you enjoyed the show. As always, I want to thank the members of the Explore Lounge who are helping us to continue doing this work. If you want to support this podcast.
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