Empowering communities to build healthier relationships with social media.
Viral Wise is a youth-led community educational initiative promoting digital literacy, mental health and community resilience.
The scrolling epidemic.
Social media addiction is rampant.
We all know somebody—a friend, family member, student, colleague—that never seems to stop scrolling.
If you use social media, you know how easy it is to get sucked in. One minute you’re logging on to see what your friends are up to, the next you’re scrolling uncontrollably through hours of videos and posts from people you don’t even know.
Of course, it isn’t all bad. Social media can help us access information, stay in touch with far away friends and grow a business or creative project.
However, its clear that there’s also a dark side to scrolling. Research has linked excessive social media use to:
Social media can also have negative impact on our communities and democracy. Social media algorithms have been found to promote the spread of misinformation and disinformation, as well as unrealistic beauty standards and harmful toxic worldviews such as the so-called “manosphere”.
Addiction by design.
Its not our fault if we’re addicted to social media.
Social media is addictive because it’s designed to be addictive! The more time we spend online, the more money the social media companies make.
Over the years, these companies have poured billions of dollars of research into developing powerful tools and tricks to keep us online for as long as possible. For example:
Humans are social creatures — we’re highly sensitive to social validation. The like button exploits these instincts. Getting likes on our posts makes us feel good and keeps us coming back for more.
Likes
Streaks turn friendships into a score. This makes breaking the streak feel like breaking the friendship and keeps us coming back to the platform for fear of loosing it.
Streaks
Social media platforms used to have pages. When you got to the bottom of each page, you had to click “next page” to load more content. The “infinite scroll” removed this and, in doing so, made it harder to know when to stop scrolling.
Infinite scroll
Power of communities.
Unhealthy habits are very hard to overcome on our own.
Instead, research shows that people tend to successfully overcome addiction and other unhealthy habits — whether that's drugs, alcohol, gambling or social media — with the help of two things:
Viral Wise believes that communities can tackle social media’s harms more effectively than individuals can on their own. That’s because communities have something that individuals don’t — each other!
With the right tools and insights, communities can create the environments and support networks necessary for their members to develop healthier relationships with social media.
Learn more about our workshops here:
Viral Wise’s approach.
Mission:
Empower communities to build healthier relationships with social media.
Approach:
1
Enhance understanding:
Give communities practical knowledge and insights into how social media works, why it’s so addictive and how it can impact our mental health.
2
Harness collective intelligence:
Bring together the ideas, insights and experiences a community to identify solutions that are unique and specific to that community.
3
Facilitate coordination:
Help communities to imagine and co-create spaces and structures for working together to tackle social media’s harms.
Learn more about our workshops here:
About Tom
As a 25-year-old, Tom was part of the first generation to grow up with social media. In an article for The Journal, he explored his first-hand experience of its harms as a teenager.
Tom studied History and Political Science at Trinity College, where he specialised in the relationship between politics, culture and technology. In college, he also founded Mangrove Report, a student publication which explored how emerging technologies were shaping the future.
Since leaving university, Tom has worked with Uplift, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, and the Hope and Courage Collective. His work has mainly involved researching the effects of social media algorithms, lobbying Irish and European politicians to strengthen regulation and educating the public.
In his free time, Tom enjoys surfing and writing poetry!