Digital Media Blog Post 2 (1/29/25)

Overview of my media consumption this week:

This week, in keeping with my new apparent theme, I signed up for Instagram. The original goal was to be able to follow my favorite DJ’s profile, but Instagram quickly connected me to most of my high school acquaintances and friends and put me into a curious loop of being pulled back to the app just to see if there was anyone I could follow that I hadn’t already. I know about how addiction to social media can be very easy to fall into, as I have experienced with Tiktok in the past, so going into this I wanted to be very structured about how I engaged with Instagram. I am doing no reels. I have all notifications off. I also am holding off on looking at peoples’ posts as much as I can. I looked at a couple and realised that it brought up a lot of feelings of envy and that was scary, so I don’t even really think I am interested in looking at people’s posts. I’ve stuck to about 15 minutes/day on Instagram.

I’m going on a camping trip this Thursday and Friday, and I've been pretty busy and exhausted with homework and emotional processing, so I haven’t spent much time on Youtube this week. I’m noticing that when I am more busy and energized, I don’t have the space to or as much interest in defaulting to Youtube, and when I am busy and out of energy, Youtube can genuinely relax me.

Story:

When I was on Youtube, I listened to a lot of early 2000s pop and dubstep mixes while doing work. I doubt the people making the mixes I listened to are getting money out of their posts, but Youtube is, so this is an excellent opportunity to talk about Youtube in general. Youtube as a company, unless it’s hard porn or copyrighted music, doesn’t care about what its creators post. The Youtube algorithm promotes videos that will increase watchtime and make the company money. The incentive here is money, so they don’t care about what the actual content is, only how it performs. You could say that Youtube tells a story just through its layout. By including a packed homepage with suggestions and hover-over viewing, autoplay, notifications, and the watch column, they sell your dopamine reward system a story that it needs to watch another video. This is manipulation and use of addictive methods for profit. Often, my dopamine system succumbs to the story that I need to watch another video, but that abusive relationship only happens when I am tired and don’t have the energy or willpower to step away for a minute. This makes me think, with fairly high certainty, that while I may feel like I need to watch another video in the moment, it is only bringing me somewhere I don’t want to go in the larger scheme. The other side of the story is that when I really am tired and just need to have some fun, Youtube is there for me if taken in the right doses. I think both are true.