On Human Connectedness

'How Facebook Makes Us Unhappy'
The New Yorker (Maria Konnikova)

The link in the caption to the left explores the phenomenon of how human attention becomes increasingly forgetful of "the path to proper, fulfilling engagement" (e.g. self-entertainment or more intimate human connectedness), as a result of certain types of social networking behavior, and the phenomenon's potential psychological effects on an increasingly hyper-stimulated and socially networked populace. Where boredom accounts for unhappiness bored people seek to actively engage their attention so to achieve the precipitated state of happiness.

I imagine the behavior is rewarded in the pleasure center of the brain, leading to the release of the "pleasure chemicals" responsible for the ensuing sense or state of "happiness" that can be derived from (and is hence chemically associated with) actively engaging on social networking media. However, in time, people will seek more avenues through which to engage said attention as the threshold for pleasure elicited from each instance of engaged attention is raised (as in the case of an addiction or tolerance). The ever-increasing need for engagement may reflect an accompanying heightened sensitivity to boredom, and is in itself a form of escapism.

A bored person may identify the engagement of their attention as the means to a cessation of their undesirable state. I imagine that increased treatments of engagement, while initially satiating boredom, require an increasingly repetitive treatment as previous treatment loads no longer activate the desired response. That is to say, the receptors responsible for triggering response have adapted to the frequency of the "pleasure chemicals" required to do so, and have in turn diminished the effects of engagement at the current levels by having increased the level of chemical required to achieve the same pleasurable effect. This means that one would have to consistently increase their engagement of attention (i.e. active participation) in order for social media's happiness effect to remain sustained. This may or may not foster a form of social dependency. It may or may not be used as a platform for the exploitation of some possibly inherent or conditioned human tendency, namely, the human predilection for contentment.

If humans are in fact forgetting "the path to proper, fulfilling engagement" because of this behavior what may be inferred is that a dependency upon social media's alternative path undermines or, at the very least, challenges the conventions of human connectedness. If our relationships are relegated to the enterprise of "likes" or online-interaction (versus more personal ones) for the sake of satisfying and sustaining happiness thresholds, due to the prevailing frequency with which these thresholds of human interaction may be maintained, it seems to me that participants will become increasingly dependent upon social platforms to fulfill these demands, despite the possibility that the genuine article of happiness (thus cessation of boredom) can only ever be healthily arrived at through direct human relations. In time, the conventional form of engagement may be swept aside in favor of the more immediate source of so-called happiness. Perhaps time will convey the opposite effect as the consequences of this mode of fulfillment are fleshed out. In the interim, social media moguls stand to benefit from their product & services.

Where social capital is the benchmark by which one measures their happiness (i.e. lack of boredom), conventional engagement is framed as an inadequate means for harvest. It can no longer provide the measure of interactivity required to sustain a person's ever-increasing standard for happiness. A person can not physically interact with people at the same rate that the internet affords them. I imagine the mean of the population shifts, as regards what more and more people come to rely upon in order to address their boredom, as they become increasingly dependent upon social media to meet the needs of their perceived engagement deficits. So, where happiness is merely the effect of some chemical processes, whatever acts to facilitate the cessation of boredom ( which is commonly associated with or presumed to be the inhibitor of happiness) is what people may rely upon for as long as it serves them to do so. How do you feel when you're not engaged?