Study Satirises Measures of Social Media Addiction
digest.bps.org.uk
digest.bps.org.uk
What I've seen is that journalists often seem to think that if social scientists can measure something, it proves that it is real. A typical headline will be something like "Studies show that 29% of us are addicted to social media." What they miss is that these studies starts with researchers making value judgements, and those judgements aren't more legitimate because a researcher made them.
This kind of research doesn't answer the question "Is social media an addiction?" It tries to answer the question, "If you think social media is an addiction, how serious is the problem?" That's why you can create a satirical measure that answers the question "How serious is the problem of friend addiction?"
The addiction classification is especially difficult. Often we call something an addiction if someone routinely engages in behavior where the negatives outweigh the positives. But when there's no common standard of measurement between the pros and cons, another value judgement has to be made about how to weight the various consequences.
I disagree. That a researcher (aka expert with significant theoretical and methodological knowledge and experience) makes a judgement on something makes it likely a better judgement than that of a random person.
But more importantly I doubt the problem is (usually) the researchers. Most good social science will give confidence intervals, careful language, etc. But how it is then spun and interpreted by university communication departments, news, science bloggers etc is often far from the actual findings.
But it seems like a weird thing to satirize in this way because aren't there already many real-world studies that demonstrate that spending less time with people IRL can be detrimental to people emotionally and even physically, and that sometimes this trade-off comes from increased time spent on social media?
Also, nobody is profiting from my gatherings with my friends or has any financial incentive to increase the amount of time I spend doing it.
I don't really get it.
As for profiting from gatherings it depends upon where they spend time together. Resturants, bars, karoke clubs, (mini)-golf, etc. may say hi. Even hiking in the woods does so indirectly shoe wear and any exercise means any food sellers have an incentive.