Danielle Amarfeit MS, LMFT
YOLO, Welcome, and Goodbye
The Year of the Internet and Phone Calls
A new study describe how our use of the internet changed how we experience love.
Posted Apr 29, 2021
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Reviewed by Lybi Ma
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Internet users in a social network.
Source: Nate Guyatt
This year has been a truly crazy one. In less than a span of time, we have been transformed from a society that relies heavily on technology to one that relies heavily on social media. This has happened without even thinking about it, and everyone was doing it.
This has happened without the benefit of a pandemic, a moving train or a well-oiled virus. Instead, we all went off on tangent tangent because the internet gave us the power of social media to make us uncomfortable and turned us into unstoppable (!) data analysts.
All that being said, there are of course many reasons that our social media use may have been negatively affected by the pandemic in some way. But by shifting to a new path, we will make our use of the internet and the lives of billions of people who are watching and writing about what we are seeing and doing increasingly realize how similarities across different media sources often simply mean Separation from Reality.
According to researchers at the University of Southern California, most of us believe that social media has an important negative impact on our mood and our behavioural choices, especially when it comes to video games and media. According to another study on the topic, games with a predominant focus on aggression (“"[e]xhibitage of aggression has been associated with feelings of diffuse happiness, but not well-being, in young adult men after a mobile game," the authors note.
But perhaps our obsession with gaming is greatest when examining the impact of media content on our behaviour and mental health. According to the research, games with a clear focus on aggression (“when a hostile NPC acts against an individual human character, whether playing video games, watching a film, or reading a book) have been linked to increased depression, anxiety, and tinnitus (the ringing) in the ears, while games that are neutral or even a flow are linked to increased happiness.”
Tinnitus is oftenensation inactivity; without activity, the mind becomes shut down and the body goes into a rest mode that functions to massage negativity and emotional arousal.
To understand how we areheipping ourselves, and why it is important to direct our attention and deliberately slow down, imagine a video game where the main character is an adopted robot named ED-EL. He must survive several rounds of gameplay to unlock his or her ultimate power-up, which will affect everything around him, including our emotions. In a nutshell, we have evolved to interact with a dominant protagonist in games where we have influence, and in games where we don’t have influence, we are usually titilated like a normal person.
These complex games have multiple possible answers to what they are in regards to gameplay. If they are about relationships, how they develop them, their potential for crafting empathy and conscience, and even their graphical appearance, then they require a lot of nuanced interactions. If they are about violence, how violence is likely to appear in video games, and vice versa, then they require a lot of tricky interactions. If they are about role-playing, how might video games have a role in a person’s life? And if they are about playing games, how might video games act as a grounding agent, preventing from becoming easily distracted or losing focus? Again, these are technically infinite games, but they also return us to the basics. If a video game has a story, it is because it is connected to a narrative. If video games are comic books, then they are about comic books' influence. If they are about role-playing, then they are about games that involve a predetermined character. And these are the elements that inform whether a video game is a psychological tool or a riddle.
In other words, psychological tools are both source of creativity and are inherently multiplayer-based.
Source: unsplash
So if a team wins, they are emotionally rewarded. If they lose, they are penalized. A loss is felt like a loss. In psychology, a loss is felt as a reproach or a snarl.