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Weimar University

David Shin

Unraveling the Social Media-Dopamine Connection

This message was recorded on the campus of Weimar University.

For more information visit our website weimar.edu.

Father in heaven we thank you for this afternoon we can spend together in reflection on heavenly themes and we pray for your Holy Spirit to inspire, to instruct, to guide our thoughts.

When I was pastoring a number of years ago, I got the call to Alaska and it became very clear that the Lord was leading there.

I'll be honest, I thought the Lord had made a mistake sending me to Siberia.

And so 1 of the ways that we looked on the bright side of things, we decided that we would start taking photos of our experience there in Alaska and we started this thing called Shinaska.

I know it's cheesy but that's what we did.

And this was before kids so we started taking these photos and I started getting into photography and so forth and posting them on my social media accounts like Instagram and Facebook and so forth.

And you don't have to be a good photographer in Alaska.

So these are some of the photos that we were able to take.

And 1 of the things that I found was when I started posting these photos on Instagram and Facebook, my likes went for me, like, through the roof.

It was like, like, like, like, comment, whoa, whoa.

And I was like, and every like and every comment was like a dopamine hit.

And so I started to invest more in photography and got better cameras and better equipment.

And 1 of the lenses that I bought while I was in Alaska was the 50 millimeters back in the day.

50 millimeter 1.2 aperture cost me like $1, 000.

But it was worth it because all I wanted was a dopamine hit from the photos.

I was gonna take with this new lens And This lens was amazing It blows out the background 1.2 aperture.

You know, I'm talking about just oh Blows out the background.

And then, this is my mea culpa here, I'm just being vulnerable.

I went on this time in my life for about 6 years where I went through cameras like they were just I don't know, but this is over a 6 year period.

The number of lenses and cameras I went through, I know, Lord help us.

I took a screenshot, I still had it, of an Excel file I had of these.

Now I didn't have them all at the same time, but I would buy them and sell them on eBay.

And my poor wife, my wife's a saint, because I'd come to a new camera and I'd say, honey, I promise you, this is the last 1.

I promise you if I get this camera, it will be the last 1 ever and this lens, I promise, she said, you promise, right?

And she's, so I get it for a little bit, and then another review would come out with a better picture, supposedly, of a better camera and so forth.

And I went through this 14 times, and finally, probation closed on me.

So what I'm about to talk about this afternoon, I'm not here to cast stones at anybody.

You're talking about a person that's got issues, all right?

A recovering dopamine addict from social media.

All right, so let's have the conversation.

Now, I want to put it out there because I believe that Emily Martin's going to be talking about the benefits of social media, and look, We know the benefits.

Look at all these ministries that have social media accounts.

Weimar, heal the hurting world, it is written, amazing facts, 3ABN, and look, I'm even on there.

I wish they would have took a better thing on that.

And so look, it has wonderful benefits and ministries.

But social media also has another side of it.

So I'm not here to say that social media doesn't have its place, it could be used for ministry and the gospel, but there's another side, a very personal side, that I think it's good for us to have this conversation on.

Now this is a former Facebook exec in his mea culpa saying that he feels tremendous guilt for what he helped make.

He says, the short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.

He talks about a time, I think in 2008 or 2009, that Facebook was stuck at only 90 million users.

And their user base was actually in a stagnation.

So this brother and Mark Zuckerberg got together and had this meeting and they decided to grow their user base.

And they studied human psychology and they spent a lot of money on this and these are 3 out of the 4 dopamine pathways and the related cognitive processes and they say that most of your dopamine is generated deep in the midbrain.

Now 1 of the things that the algorithms does is what is called an unexpected reward learning.

See if you get an unexpected reward It's basically the equivalent of what we call the slot machine effect.

And they use these algorithms in this way.

This is from the Harvard Business Review.

It says Instagram's notification algorithms will sometimes withhold likes on your photos to deliver them in larger bursts.

So when you make your post, you may be disappointed to find less responses than you expected, only to receive them in a larger bunch later on.

Your dopamine centers have been primed by those initial negative outcomes to respond robustly to the sudden influx of social appraisal.

Let me make this very, very illustrative and practical This is a photo I took, Anchorage, Alaska Posted it on Instagram and Facebook I actually went through this, alright?

So let's say you post These are my 2 golden retrievers And you always get likes and comments on puppy photos, right?

And so I spent a lot of time on this photo.

I hiked all the way up to this place with my 2 dogs, got in the right angle, made sure the lighting was just right, all with the motivation of getting my dopamine fixed for that day.

And so I took this photo, and let's say I post it on Instagram and Facebook, and I keep checking and checking and checking and checking and checking, and I'm like, man, there's not enough likes like I got before.

And I keep going back and going back and going back and going back and then suddenly out of the blue at 1 a.m Because I'm on there There's an influx of 50 comments and 50 likes and loves and hearts and amazing and I'm like That's what these guys do and you're hooked Harvard Business Review if you've ever in this place your phone you may have experienced a mild state of panic until it's found.

About 73% of people claim to experience this unique flavor of anxiety, which makes sense when you consider that adults in the US spend an average of 2-5 hours per day tapping, typing, and swiping their devices.

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Unraveling the Social Media-Dopamine Connection

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