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Hacking the Mind: The social media movement

  • Writer: Gary-Alan Hopkins
    Gary-Alan Hopkins
  • Feb 26, 2021
  • 3 min read

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The rise of social media has fundamentally changed our lives and behaviors. However, for this article, we will not be discussing social media in a vacuum. Everything is connected and requires a holistic look. These changes to our lives have had both positive and negative experiences. Some of the more positive aspects of social media platforms include creating a sense of community, offering a way to connect with people over great distances who have similar interests, hobbies, personalities, lifestyles, etc., a place to share live updates, images and videos with friends and family, and it offers real-time news and sports updates directly to us. There are many more examples of how social media has changed our lives however, these changes have had unexpected consequences.


Our use of social media has exploded with the widespread use of Wi-Fi and smartphones. Still, while people all over the world gained access to smartphones and the Internet tech companies have had to keep people active on said platforms. This has led to many continuous debates on the ethics of data mining and the use of psychological hacking. So, how has this affected sports reporting?


One impact social media has had on sports reporting and news reporting, in general, is the added stress it has caused to reporters. Prior to the advent of social media and smartphones, reporters had to do a lot of the same tasks as they do now such as interviewing players, coaches and others within a sports team, report on games, practices and breaking news about a player or coach, research and writing articles, and various other tasks needed to report accurate stories. However, on top of these sometimes-challenging aspects of their career reporters need to understand and use social media for live videos, images, interviews, promotion of articles, and live blogging. These “extra” tasks have been created, in part, by the strategies used by tech companies to get people to use, stay and engage on their platforms.


You see tech companies are like any other business. If people use the platform the business is moving forward. It is not enough to have people visiting these sites occasionally because these companies have a tremendous number of investments, operating costs, and need to generate money for shareholders and employees. If a company cannot adapt to the changing demands of our fluid culture then it will fail as a company. So, this has led to using strategies that help alter our human behavior (hacking the human mind).


Let us look at operant conditioning as proposed in 1938 by the psychologist B.F. Skinner. As I said in the beginning everything is connected. The rise in the use of social media has had help from cell phones, smartphones and other mobile technologies like laptops, tablets, and smartwatches. Operant conditioning boils down to offering reinforcements (rewards) for a particular behavior thus encouraging people to engage in reward-seeking behavior. We must remember that companies like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, etc. started off with a goal of connecting people and offering a way for people to showcase their unique selves. As a society, we eagerly demanded more, and the tech businesses needed to grow so they looked for ways to keep people engaged on their platforms. So, now a large percentage of the world’s population has one, if not many, social media accounts that send notifications to our electronic devices. These notifications act like rewards or reinforcements for our behaviors.


This is nothing new, marketing agencies and businesses have been doing this since the beginning of the Marketing and Advertising industry. What has changed is the amount of data we give to the tech industry and how they use it against us to solicit the desired behavior. However, there are those that have seen the way big tech companies use this data and are working to adopt better practices. What is your opinion about social media? What do you think about the strategies companies use to get people to engage with their brands? How does all this make you feel?

4 Comments


kyvareberg
kyvareberg
Mar 09, 2021

Gary-alan - I think companies are using the tech that is available to them. I am always curious as to whether the new changes in social media are only there because we, as consumers, almost demand them. And in result, companies change to give us what we want. If we stopped asking for constant connectivity, maybe it would all change? Hmmm. What would this do to sports reporting? If we stopped wanting to connect so much... -Kyle

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christine.miller
Mar 01, 2021

Great post. I think it is smart for businesses to use social media. Only because social media is not going anywhere. And I think everyone has at least 1 social media. It seems that people cannot go one day without scrolling once, so why not put your business out there. You made great points.

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jekaterina.flanagan
Mar 01, 2021

You have some very good insights in this post. I agree that social media has been integrated into our lives further and further for the most part because of corporate greed. It was a completely new field where to make money and business, and in this case, money is made based on people and their interests. In a way, it feels like we are falling down the rabbit hole further and further, and there is no end to be seen when it comes to algorithms, data collection, and questionable private information handling practices of many social media companies.


When it comes to companies who use social media, I don't necessarily blame them for using social listening and similar techniques. If…

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johnsonw7
Mar 01, 2021

I love this post and how you bring in the best of both worlds. As the positives that are coming from social media, but also the struggles that reports are facing with it in particular. My side to social media it is a great thing that happen to our world in a way it has made everything that much faster as we are a fast past world. Its now at your finger tips to find out anything you want. I believe that some companies do a great job at marketing there companies and that is why we see them on top of everyone else. The one thing I do not like about this is addictiveness it has caused for our…

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