The “scientific” approach analyzes it as follows: Thanks to neuroscience, we are beginning to understand that achieving a goal or receiving a reward because one has completed a task can cause excitement in specific neurons, which release the neurotransmitter dopamine to the brain’s pleasure centers. This in turn causes the feeling of pleasure.
Consequently, some people “get stuck” in the pursuit of this kind of pleasure and engage in constantly repeated movements and actions, such as the need to continuously play a video game, or to constantly check their email, or to continuously gamble online. They get trapped within repetition, within the same circuit.
The commercial and crude sociological approach goes something like this: According to a study on consumers in Australia conducted by the media sales company RadiumOne, the use of social media is a dopamine goldmine. “Every time we send, share or hit ‘like’, every time we comment on something or send a photo or video, we create an expectation for ourselves,” says the research result. “We gain a sense of belonging, and we develop ourselves through sharing.” Mauricio Delgado, a psychology professor at Rutgers University, says that when you share things that naturally give you a dose of dopamine, you get a second dose when you send them to others and wait for their ‘like’.
We could mock both neuroscientists and psychologists – and of course merchants with advertisers! They make “discoveries” seriously, as if our species had only begun its existence on the planet just a decade ago. As if hormones were only released recently: there was no life before Facebook!!!
The fact is that so-called social media do for social relationships what electric treadmills in gyms do for playful walking: they offer an easy simulation, in a historical period of mature capitalism where ease is considered absolutely positive. Not for neurobiological but clearly for social and ideological reasons.
Does the young person who is glued to their smartphone resemble the retiree who tends their garden every afternoon? Both of their nervous systems “release dopamine” – so what?
The sure thing is that no one made a fortune from digging someone else’s garden; and no one, also, made a career commenting on gardeners and porters…