On a brisk morning in the fall, postgraduate student Ni Fang came across an academic concept she was unfamiliar with while studying at a library in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province.

Mobile phones are used at a livestreaming studio during the Mobile World Congress last month in Shanghai. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

She promptly took out her phone and clicked on a search engine app to find the information she needed.

As she was doing this, she received a notification from Sina Weibo of news about her favorite actor, and wasted no time viewing this on her phone.

After watching numerous short videos featuring the actor, Ni realized that more than an hour had passed and she had yet to finish her paper, which was due to be handed in the next day. In annoyance, she closed the Sina Weibo app and returned to her academic work.

That night, she checked screen usage on her phone for the first time and was surprised to find she had used the social media platform for more than 34 hours a week, or nearly five hours a day on average.

“I have been using Weibo for six or seven years, and it has basically become second nature for me to check it when I take out my phone,” Ni said.

“I know social media can sometimes be irritating, because to some extent it’s impossible to ignore, but I never thought I’d spend that much of time on it.”

In addition to Sina Weibo, Ni uses other platforms, including Weixin and Douyin.

Like her, many users find it hard to resist social media, which consumes a lot of their time.

In 2017, a report released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and technology giant Tencent showed that 73 percent of young people who took part in a survey checked social media sites at least once every 15 minutes. Just over 71 percent said they would do so even while they were at work or in meetings.

It is a similar story across the world. In 2018, the Pew Research Center, a public opinion research organization, found that more than 50 percent of teenagers said they spent too much time on their phones, and 41 percent said they used social media excessively.

He Rihui, a psychiatrist and former member of the Chinese Association of Drug Abuse Prevention and Treatment, said the obsession with social media “lies deep in psychology and in a complex chemical response system in our brains”.

“People crave immediate positive emotions, which are not easy to get in real life. However, a simple touch of the phone can lead them to a world with numerous funny videos and dialogue boxes with friends living overseas,” He said.

“When a person posts a picture and receives social feedback, it stimulates the brain to release dopamine, which rewards that behavior and perpetuates the social media habit.”

Passengers on the Beijing subway browse sites on their mobiles. (DU LANYI / CHINA DAILY)

Adam Alter, author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, said another reason people spend so much time on social media is that there are no “cues” telling them to stop and move on to something different.

Such cues were more apparent in the 20th century, he said. “Take a newspaper, for example. Eventually you get to the end and put it aside. It’s the same with magazines and books. When you watch a television show, it also ends at some point.

“But with social media consumption today, there are no cues to stop. The news feeds just roll on and everything is endless－Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, email, text messaging－and when you check all sorts of other sources, you can just keep going on and on and on,” he said in a TED talk.

The pandemic and measures taken to curb the spread of COVID-19, such as lockdowns, have also increased social media use worldwide. Researchers attribute this to a deep desire to feel connected and escape the sense of being isolated.

A study released in January by Nanyang Technological University in Singapore found that use of online messaging and social media apps among the city state’s residents had risen during the pandemic.

A survey carried out by the Hammerkopf consultancy in India last year, where there are 326 million social media users, found that 87 percent said they were using such platforms more than before a lockdown was enforced.

Users in the United States and the United Kingdom also found they were spending more time on social media last year, with 50 percent of them in the US using it for between 30 minutes and two hours more than usual each day.

Short videos have also become more popular during the pandemic.

In China, the number of daily users of Douyin and Kuaishou reached 600 million and 300 million in August and June respectively.

According to a research report last year by the China Netcasting Services Association on the development of internet audio-visual programs, the number of short-video users in China reached 818 million. They accounted for 87 percent of internet users and on average spent 110 minutes watching videos each day.

Chen Ziran, 30, a Beijing office worker, said that during the pandemic he used social media for up to 10 hours a day.

“I worked from home and used WeChat to stay connected with my colleagues and customers. Even when I was off work, I spent a lot of time browsing Sina Weibo for COVID-19 updates and watching short videos,” he said.

“This had a dual effect on me. Connecting online ended the feeling of being isolated, but negative news during the pandemic made me anxious. However, I couldn’t stop watching.”

Endlessly browsing social media sites and reading bad news is known as doom-scrolling, a term that originated in 2018, but which has gained popularity during the pandemic. Last year, New Zealanders chose it as the word of the year.

A subway commuter checks her phone in Shanghai. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Tim Bono, assistant dean at the College of Arts and Sciences and a lecturer in psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, US, said that paying more attention to negative information is “etched on the human gene”.

“In our evolutionary past, anyone who was not tuned into potential threats in the environment may have missed looming danger that could jeopardize an individual’s survival,” he said in an email.

“Therefore, genes that were most likely to be passed on from one generation to the next predisposed us to give special attention to those negative aspects of our environments that could be harmful to us.”

Fears about the pandemic have definitely been a factor in the amount of time people spend onscreen.

Combined with the addictive nature of social media, negative headlines have become especially powerful in attracting attention and keeping users scrolling to learn more.

Psychologists fear this may have a negative impact on mental health, while research has shown a link between excessive social media use and increased feelings of depression and loneliness.

Researchers have even compared the effects of excessive social media use to drug abuse, as overuse affects decision-making abilities and makes risky behavior more likely, according to a study published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions in 2019.

As a result, according to experts, people’s sleep can be disrupted, affecting their overall performance the following day.

The Netflix docudrama The Social Dilemma, which has triggered heated discussion since its release in September, highlights the impact of social media addiction, including negative effects on mental health and the spread of misinformation.

Former technology industry leaders interviewed in the film give their views about social media and the disturbing trend of overuse, which they attribute to “technological manipulation” by tech giants such as Google and Facebook.

Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, said in the film that these companies usually have three main goals.

“There’s the engagement goal－to drive up your usage, to keep you scrolling. There’s the growth goal－to keep you coming back and inviting many friends and getting them to invite more friends,” Harris said. “And then there’s the advertising goal－to make sure that, as all this is happening, companies are making as much money as possible from advertising.”

Harris said that to attract more users, tech companies turn to a series of devices such as heart designs, “likes”, reposts and thumbs-up buttons. These short-term signals act as a type of reward by “implanting an unconscious habit” so that people become more addicted to social media without realizing it.

A child takes classes online at home in Shenyang, Liaoning province, on Jan 12. Study-from-home regimen is part of the new normal, as the outbreak of COVID-19 has led to the growth of online education. (ZOU DEXIN / FOR CHINA DAILY)

Justin Rosenstein, a former Facebook engineer who invented the “like” button, said, “We’re seeing corporations using powerful artificial intelligence to outsmart us and figure out how to draw our attention toward the things they want us to look at, rather than those that are most consistent with our goals, values and lives.”

He, the psychiatrist, said that unlike the critical tone of the documentary, there is no need to view social media as a monster.

“It’s a new technology revolution to help people live and connect better. We benefit a lot from it. Sometimes, it can be annoying, but during the pandemic we need social media to get information. Social media is everywhere. We cannot erase it from our lives, because we are human, we are social animals and we always have a deep need to connect to the world,” He said.

“People always exaggerate the negatives, because this ‘new thing’ is outside their comfort zone,” He added.

In 2000, people were bombarded with news and research about internet addiction. Some reports even described the internet as “electronic heroin”. Now, it has long become part of everyday life.

“Technology always evolves faster than humans, and we are not mature enough to handle it properly. It takes time,” He said.

“But as Chairman Mao Zedong put it, strategically we should despise all our enemies, but tactically we should take them all seriously. People need to be serious on social media and use it positively.”

Ni, the postgraduate student in Hangzhou, decided to stop receiving social media notifications on her phone after handing in her academic assignment paper in October. She now feels under less pressure to check such platforms.

She also found that deciding on the exact amount of time to spend on using platforms really helps.

Chen, the Beijing office worker, who now spends half the working week operating from home, has gained more control of his life, at least during weekends.

Six months ago, he began to limit his use of social media, starting with the amount of time spent onscreen after work.

“It was hard initially. I even failed for the first two weekends. Then, I tried to find other things to do. For example, I set myself the goal of finishing reading a book every two weeks. I also do jigsaw puzzles－my favorite activity when I was a child,” Chen said.

“The most important thing is to find out why you want to quit social media. It made me anxious and I was not happy with it, as it occupied so much of my time, so I decided to change things during weekends,” he said.

Bono, from Washington University, suggested some ways to avoid excessive use of social media.

“Put your phone out of reach. Download apps that monitor or limit how much time you spend on particular sites. Keep your social media apps buried in folders on the last page of your phone, or avoid using the apps and make yourself log onto a web browser each time,” he said.

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