5 Ways Social Media Tricks You Into Using Social Media

3. Facebook's "Message Seen"

This is easily the most annoying feature on any social networking site. When your Facebook messages are seen by another person without that person responding, Facebook will let you know that person has seen it. On first glance, that doesn't seem like that bad of an idea: if that message was something along the lines of "Meet me there at 6" and the person read it but didn't respond, it's helpful to know that. But save for a few relatively uncommon circumstances, what the "message seen" feature does is make it so that people no longer read messages when they are delivered. Another aspect that is standard with social media is making sure that other people don't think you are constantly on social media, even though you definitely are. One can read into that response, or lack thereof, from a psychoanalytic point of view. The receiver of the message instinctively prolongs the anticipation of the return of the message to the sender in order to sustain the anticipation (and thus activating the dopamine trigger) the sender has for the return message arrival. So you allow messages to pile up in your inbox, aware of their existence but hesitant to actually click on them (and thus let the other person know you have seen it), which inherently limits the experience that social networks are supposed to provide. If we use Facebook to communicate with other people more efficiently, and then choose not to communicate with them as efficiently as we're provided the opportunity to, what's the point? Furthermore, it makes people consistently self-conscious about their messaging in relation to other users. If one sees that they have sent six messages which have all been read and not responded to by their Facebook friends, then the cycle of anticipation and reception has been broken. This theoretically could lead to a user abandoning the site, but the genius of Facebook is that it recognizes its ubiquity and uses that to its advantage. Almost everyone you know is on Facebook, the people you sent messages to aren't responding, so it's time to message someone new in order to get your fix of anticipatory dopamine again.