Sedona, AZ–What can be communicated to the human mind? How do messages relay in the mind for determinations of affect? Could specific destinations in the mind be targeted? How much can be controlled against allowing communications free will on the mind? Are there interpretations of the external world that are not linked to communications to the mind?
Assuming that in the human mind, there are divisions—mainly emotions, memory, feelings and regulations of internal senses—across destinations. Assuming they all have subdivisions, memory—intelligence, thoughts, planning, reasoning, and so on; emotions—fear, delight, hurt, reward, craving, pleasure, and so forth; feelings—cold, heat, appetite, thirst, pain, itch, fatigue and so on; regulation or modulation of internal senses.
How do these divisions achieve a balance that ensures mental health? Could the voluminous and varied communication, say from intense social media use, drive the mind in different directions? Could it be beneficial, per instance? Could it take a toll, in general? How much mental health is the human mind directly responsible for?
There is a recent opinion in The NYTimes, Surgeon General: Why I’m Calling for a Warning Label on Social Media Platforms, stating that, “The mental health crisis among young people is an emergency — and social media has emerged as an important contributor. Adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms, and the average daily use in this age group, as of the summer of 2023, was 4.8 hours. Additionally, nearly half of adolescents say social media makes them feel worse about their bodies. It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents. A surgeon general’s warning label, which requires congressional action, would regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe. Evidence from tobacco studies show that warning labels can increase awareness and change behavior.”
There are lots of push backs against this because the science, or more precisely, the social science, is not clear. There are association studies for large-scale benefits and in some cases for harm. This has also been linked to generational moral panic like TVs, video games and others.
The human mind is principally in the domain of brain science, not social science. The human mind is directly responsible for mental health. If anything would affect mental health, in a good way or otherwise, how does it relay in the human mind? What is the human mind? How is it different from the body?
The focus of the benefit or harm of social media on mental health could be centered on communication to the mind. For example, it is possible to speak in a certain way or appear in a certain outfit on social media to communicate belonging to a group, for a destination of emotion, acceptance, or attachment on the mind of viewers. It is possible to communicate a feeling—like what to fear, in messages on social media. It is also possible not intend to communicate any emotion or feeling with a neutral message of knowledge or learning, but it may communicate an emotion of love or interest to some and intimidation or hate to others.
There are people that have used social media, where, by comparing themselves with what they saw, communicated inferiority to them. Some others had superiority communicated to them. There are responses that some people got that communicated dislike, by others, to them, which relayed—on the mind—to prompting towards self-harm.
If social media is beneficial, a focus is communication. If it is harmful, a focus is what was communicated. What also followed that communication? For benefits like learning or awareness, there could be pleasure. For harm, there could be prompting to do something. Communication tracking in the human mind could advance mental health against harms of social media.
For social media, a static warning label like for tobacco may not be as effective as a dynamic warning label per interval on what the posts might be communicating to the mind, for momentary awareness against the sway, from the source to the minds of the receivers.
There is a recent piece in The Conversation, Surgeon general’s call for warning labels on social media underscores concerns for teen mental health, stating that, “the strategy of warning labels has been used for eating disorder content and digitally altered images on the internet, with mixed results. These studies showed that the warning labels do not reduce the negative impact of the media on body image. Some of the research even found that the warning labels might increase body and appearance comparisons, which are thought to be key reasons why social media can be harmful to self-esteem.”
Singular or static labels for something as dynamic as social media may be less effective. Exploring what is communicated per instance and what may follow after that communication on the mind may be precise.
There is a feature in The NYTimes, Researchers Say Social Media Warning Is Too Broad, with the quote, “It’s kind of like saying, ‘Is the number of calories that you eat good for you or bad for you?’. It depends. Is it candy, or is it vegetables? If your child is spending all day on social media following The New York Times feed and talking about it with their friends, that’s probably fine, you know?”
Maybe. There is a lot that news can communicate to different minds, with varying affect. There are also comments as well. There could be a cumulative effect on the mind.
There is another feature on the Boston Globe, Surgeon general is wrong; social media apps don’t need warning labels, stating that, “Because there is no good evidence linking social media use to negative outcomes, a call for warning labels is unlikely to survive court scrutiny. The First Amendment does not allow the government to require private entities to broadcast the government’s message, in this case by carrying a warning label. In some extreme cases, if the evidence of harm is clear, as it was for cigarettes, exceptions may be made. The “explicit lyrics” sticker affixed to music, the product of a moral panic over rock music in the 1980s, has only managed to increase explicit lyrics in music as the sticker itself attracts sales from youth. Famously, in the 1980s the surgeon general warned that games such as Pac-Man and Asteroids were a pressing social problem. The surgeon general proved to be wrong then and is wrong now.”
What is the constancy of music and games to the variability of posts on social media? How steep are the positive and negative emotions from music and games to those from social media on the mind?
There is a feature on The Atlantic, A Social-Media Warning Label Could Be as Long as This Article, with the quote, “The science simply does not support this action and issuing advisories based on fear will only weaken our trust in the institutions that wield them in this way. It is time to have a real conversation about adolescent mental health in this country versus simply scapegoating social media.”
There cannot be a balanced argument for or against social media without the human mind, or what can be communicated to it, or the relays on the mind, post-communication. While social science association studies are the basis of the science, the nervous system—where the mind is—is the ultimate decision maker of where mental health resides. Neither genes nor the environment are the human mind.
There are several articles on what is good or bad for mental health that ignore the human mind. A normal thing that can be good for someone at one point may not be, at another, by the mind. A normal thing that can be good for one person may not be, for another person. The human mind decides, and brain science is the forte of the mind. For social media, how can intentionality and consequences also be helpful in preventing some of the harms, such that without a major or general label, there are approaches, using communication relays, from now, with some social media companies, as pilots?
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