The Infinite Opium Den

This week I needed to get a replacement mobile phone, and so I went to my local Vodafone shop to see what they had. While being served, I became bored but felt the temptation to scroll through my timelines on my phone would be rude, so I did what people used to do before the age of social media and mobile phones: I looked around the room. 

The shop was moderately busy, and after I’d scanned the usual bustle of bored sales assistants pretending to be very interested in the needs of potential customers, my eyes came to rest on a particular advert as to why you should purchase a phone on the Vodafone network. 

It was quite beautiful and eye-catching in a way, carefully crafted to draw the eyes away from the image and the beginning of the message in order to bring one’s focus to the main takeaway of what they were offering. In bold, pink neon letters, it was promised that Vodafone would provide you with “ENDLESS SOCIAL MEDIA.”

The seconds passed into minutes as my sales assistant busied herself with her terminal, occasionally making a comment on how slow the system was as I stared at this advert and its promise. Endless social media…why would that be a selling point, exactly? 

It’s well-known that social media is highly addictive; even standing there waiting for the lady to complete my transaction, I was feeling the itch to take out my phone and start to scroll. Social media apparently triggers a dopamine release in your brain similar to that of drugs and alcohol, and when deprived of this source of pleasure, a similar response is shown by a junkie who is denied his fix. 

One might think that it is all well and good for an informed adult to use social media to their heart’s content; after all, they can drink and do drugs, and are considered to be responsible for their own actions. But look at the sheer amount of time we use our phones; even standing there for fifteen minutes in the shop with nothing to do was enough to make me feel like I needed the nicotine hit of my timeline. Is that not something of which I should be concerned?

If I were standing there, desperately craving drugs or alcohol at 11 am, I should rightfully be scorned as a junkie or drunkard. My lack of self-control would be evident to anyone who saw me drinking or smoking drugs before it was even noon, and I should feel ashamed of allowing myself to fall prey to such temptations. However, with our social media usage, there is no such social prohibition; we are constantly inundating our brains with the dopamine of our timelines whenever we have a free minute. 

It is no wonder then that Silicon Valley executives simply forbid their children, and even the nannies who take care of their children, from using mobile devices and social media. After all, they know that their products are addictive. They are the ones who did the original studies to find this out and leveraged this knowledge to maximise the user base of their platforms. 

As one Facebook executive put it: “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children.” Among those people whose entire careers and fortunes are built on this addictive technology, it is well-known that social media is a vice and its excessive use is bad for the mental health of the addicts. They outright prohibit the use of most of their technologies by their own children, and that is the morally correct thing to do. 

You would never allow your children to drink alcohol or get high on drugs in the middle of the day because you know how obviously bad this would be for their personal development, mental health, and future prospects. You know that raising your child to be an addict would be a shameful, sinful thing, and you would rightly be looked down upon for allowing it to happen; such behaviour is criminalised precisely because it is so damaging. 

Yet here I was, standing in what amounted to an infinite opium den. With its limitless supply of digital opium as one of its main selling points, I too was itching for my fix. I watched one blonde female sales assistant try to find the correct pipe phone for the lady she was serving, and I could only see two people who were hopelessly in the grip of a vice that they did not even recognise. 

I have young children and I have never permitted them to use social media. I had previously done this on instinct because it just seemed like it wasn’t a good idea for a child to spend all their time staring into a glowing screen. Now, it seems like we should all take a leaf out of the books of our drug manufacturers and ensure we not only do not allow children to use social media at all, but we do our best to limit our use of that drug as well. 

I found it profoundly disturbing that “ENDLESS SOCIAL MEDIA” was so easily advertised when it is so obviously bad for us; this isn’t a boon, it’s a curse. We should probably consider what kind of society we are living in when we have high street stores that act as infinite opium dens without any kind of regulation. 

Should we have drug pushers like this on the streets, and also available to children? Is it not worth at least considering the consequences of such easy access to addictive substances like social media, and should there at least not be a legal age limit on such things?