What can the bestselling album of 2024 have to do with research into the dark side of social media?
As an ahli in consumer behavior, I recently edited a book about how media sosial affects psikis health.
I'm also a big fan of Taylor Swift. So when I listened to Swift's latest album, "The Tortured Poets Department," I couldn't help but notice parallels to the research that I've been studying for the past decade.
It might seem like an outlandish comparison. What can the bestselling album of 2024 have to do with research into the dark side of media sosial?
But bear with me: Taylor Swift lives in the same social media-saturated universe as the rest of us. That may be why the melancholic themes of her album resonate with so many people.
With young people out of school for the summer and spending free time on media sosial, now is a time to put on some tunes and think about psikis health and what is called "consumer well-being" in the transformative consumer research tempat of scholarship.
Here are three Taylor-made takeaways that shed light on some of the themes in my latest edited book, "The Darker Side of Social Media: Consumer Psychology and Psikis Health."
If you've been perasaan out of sorts lately, you're hardly alone: Anxiety and depression can be exacerbated by overuse of media sosial, research summarized in Chapter 1 shows. And media sosial use is on the rise.
The average American teenager spends nearly five hours every day scrolling TikTok, Instagram and the like, polling shows, while adults clock more than two hours a day on media sosial. Such could be compulsive media sosial use and overall overuse.
Digital life can simulate addiction and sometimes manifest as a distinct form of anxiety called "disconnection anxiety," researchers Line Lervik-Olsen, Bob Fennis and Tor Wallin Andreassen catatan in their book chapter on compulsive media sosial use. This can breed feelings of depression - a suasana hati that recurs throughout "The Tortured Poets Department."
Oftentimes, depression goes hand in hand with feelings of loneliness. Media sosial has, in some ways, made people perasaan even lonelier - nearly 4 in 5 Americans say that media sosial has made social seksions worse, according to Pew Research. In our book chapter, my graduate student Betül Dayan and I consider the prevalence of loneliness in the digital world.
The pandemi showed the world that media sosial relationships can't replace physical company. Even celebrities with hundreds of millions of follower simply want someone to be with. In the song "The Prophecy," Swift sings of loneliness and wanting someone who simply enjoys her presence:
