What’s Behind Our Scrolling

Wake up. Scroll. Shower. Scroll. Breakfast. Scroll. The endless cycle repeats. Through carefully curated aesthetics, trends, and engagement cues, the most bland of concepts could gain an entirely new adoration. 

Variations of opinions, cultures, trends, cures, and misinformation flood the screen to subconsciously tell us, the consumers, exactly how to comply. Noting the ongoing surge of marketing and advertising now being launched through social media, and the trending increase of brand deals with influencers. The unclear biases of social media create a complete sense of illusion at times. 

Oftentimes, we social media users simply scroll past information we may not fully understand, leaving us only with a small bit of knowledge on whatever topic it was. It can feel harmless to spend so long consuming our feeds, but there are real effects it has on us viewers. Even a post that may not make sense to us can have a subconscious effect on our brains. It creates and reinforces schemas, or negative core beliefs, that we viewers have. Leading us to subconsciously alter our perception of the world. 

Any post we scroll past could be harmless indeed, or not. A video of the local farmers market could’ve completely inaccurately depicted what a random southern community was like. 

Maybe the restaurant in a new movie was a subtle advertisement. Suddenly everyone is rushing to be the first to post at the new trending spot. 

Or a mother claiming to be making a change in the world for her children is simply marketing off of them. And little did we know they were chained to their beds off screen. 

The model you saw could have been a completely AI generated post, or not. She won’t follow you back either way, you pick!

The factuality and organicness of any community can alter our perception in a matter of seconds. It is our responsibility as consumers to process and intake the information we see in proactive ways, realizing the amount of un-credible information being spread online holds a genuine difference. 

Additionally, the online algorithms have been carefully designed based on the patterns and behaviors of a specific user’s activity. This process tracks our location, friends, searches, likes, hashtags, activity times, and almost all other online activity, and is done on just about any online source. All done in order to repeat the patterns and keep us consumers actively scrolling. The algorithm repeats the familiar content in which the consumer engaged with the most. 

The speed, accessibility, illusion, and addiction of social media are considerably dangerous. Falling into what is now trending as “doom scrolling” is incredibly easy for consumers thanks to this algorithm. And its ability to remove us from the present moment, and into whatever new AI dog is trending, happens quicker than most prefer to admit.

Our personal algorithm’s patterns repeat indefinitely, along with its consumer, and work to subconsciously solidify the patterns of our personal beliefs, perspective, interests, opinions, and more. Because all social media really does is repeat the consumer’s previous engagement patterns. 

• socialmedia
• trends