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Jovian Soejono

Let’s just scroll real quick…

What’s the phone doing on that desk?


Picture the situation: you have a unit test coming up tomorrow in one of your subjects. It’s probably a pretty easy 7, but first, you’ll need to review the course content and answer a few sample questions. It won’t take more than an hour, probably. With three hours left in the evening before your bedtime, you decide to reach for your nearby phone and open Instagram. Or TikTok or whatever might be applicable. After all, a bit of entertainment won’t do any harm, right? Nobody enjoys a “work hard, no play” lifestyle. The first video is great, relatable - it resonates completely. ‘Oh, that was a good one’, you think. Let’s go for another: it’s also a great one. Suddenly, you hear one of your parents shouting, “Time for bed!” You look up at the clock - it’s already 11 PM. Reluctantly, you go to sleep, remembering that you didn’t do any studying. The next day, you completely blank out on the exam and get a 4 on what would have been a relatively easy 7.


Okay, it might not be that extreme, but most of us would be lying if we claimed that we had never turned a five-minute scrolling session into half an hour, heck, even an hour. I can speak for myself here - for most of my school life so far, I’ve always tried to be “different” and stay away from social media - until I finally gave in six months ago and got Instagram, to try to keep up with my classmates a bit more. Already in that short period of time, I’ve developed an addiction to scrolling through the endless Instagram Reels feed.


You’ve probably heard this lecture many times before, and are bored of it. Then again, so have I, and yet what was supposed to be a brief exploration of Reels at the start of my Instagram journey has ballooned into an addiction anyway. Hence, I figured we might all benefit from a slightly less gloomy discussion of why this sort of thing happens in the first place. I can really only speak for Instagram Reels here, but I suppose a similar explanation can be given for TikTok or other social media. Note that this is not even inclusive of checking Instagram for likes on posts or stories.


Instagram is owned by Meta, which, as is common knowledge now, has an unfathomable amount of access to your personal data. When you visit pretty much any website, you might click “accept all cookies” absent-mindedly, but in doing so you’re essentially allowing that website to track all your activity on it, which will naturally be sold to companies like Meta and feed directly into your user experience on their services (like Instagram). This is why rejecting the cookies is a better option, even if you have to click through several menus to get it done.


Services like DuckDuckGo also offer tracking protection across different media. It turns out that some emails actually contain trackers that activate when you open them, monitoring your mouse movement, etc. Mobile apps also track a surprising amount. Search engines like Google similarly track your interests through your queries.


Then, of course, there’s the issue with what you do on Instagram itself. How long you watch a certain video can estimate your level of interest in that kind of topic, and help Instagram gauge the extent to which it should recommend similar videos in the future. Follow some account or consistently get sent videos of a certain topic, and the algorithm will pick up on that and inject lots of similar videos into your feed, sensing that you’ll spend more time on them. I’ve had a real-life experience with this: one of my friends was sending me many reels about the gym for a period of time which drove the algorithm to recommend numerous gym-related accounts to me, one of which I would ultimately follow.


All this hyper-tracking is of course designed to keep you on the app forever, which can eventually induce clicking on ads and other engagements. Now, given that your Instagram feed is fit pretty much exactly to your interests, it will become hard to stay away from the app once the cycle has gotten going. I haven’t even talked about how dopamine causes you to constantly check the app for new likes on posts (plus the notifications that come with new likes), which might draw you into the endless scrolling cycle I mentioned above.


So how much is “a minute” of scrolling? More like an hour. Put the phone out of reach.


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