People enter a dissociative state when they use social media extensively. You then feel outside of the real world. It's like reading a good book and being so transfixed that you no longer notice what's actually happening. This is what researchers at the University of Washington (UW) found out.
Mimikama Information: What is meant by a dissociative disorder?
A dissociative disorder involves a partial or complete “breaking apart” (disintegration) of normally related psychological abilities. These can be sensory perception, memory, consciousness, one's own identity or control over body movements. Typical symptoms include, for example, that someone lacks the memory of certain periods of time, that touch is no longer perceived, that body movements are disturbed or that someone loses their identity for a while. (Source: Therapie.de )
Disconnecting from the world
“I think a lot of people feel shame when they overuse social media. I prefer to talk about dissociation rather than addiction. Then the expression also changes. Instead of, 'I should be able to have more self-control,' it's, 'We all naturally distance ourselves from the real world in many ways, whether daydreaming or scrolling through Instagram.' “We then no longer pay attention to what is happening around us,” says UW researcher Amanda Baughan.
Baughan came up with the idea of studying everyday dissociation and social media use in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown, when people increasingly turned to social media for lack of real-world social contact.
“Dissociation is defined as being completely absorbed in what you are doing. When you wake up from it, sometimes there's this feeling of: How did I get here? Where did the 30 minutes go, I just wanted to check a notification,” said Baughan.
Control with the “Chirp” app
Her team developed the app “Chirp,” which was connected to subjects’ Twitter accounts. Through Chirp, users' likes and tweets appear on the real social media platform, but researchers can control people's experience and add new features or quick pop-up polls.
“One of the questions we had was: What happens if we rebuild a social media platform so that it still offers what people like about it, but it is also designed with the express goal of giving the user the "To give you control over your time and attention?" asks Alexis Hiniker, UW assistant professor of computer science.
The researchers asked 43 Twitter users from the US to use Chirp for a month. For each session, after three minutes, users saw a dialog box asking them to rate, on a scale of one to five, how much they agreed with the statement "I'm currently using Chirp without really paying attention to what I'm doing." . The dialog box continued to appear every 15 minutes. Over the course of the month, 42 percent of participants agreed or strongly agreed with this statement at least once. After the month, researchers conducted in-depth interviews with eleven participants. Seven subsequently experienced dissociations while using Chirp.
Source: pte
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Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )

