Social Media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram consume nowadays most of our time, without even realizing how dumb is making us, very much like a drug.

You might ask: Dumb? Yes, definitely social media is making people dumb, however not only dumb but controlled.

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Social media facilitates the creation and sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks. Nowadays social media seems to be a platform just based on entertainment and that is only used to spend our free time doing something worthless. It's also becoming more and more difficult to talk about something important, or controversial without every utterance of an opinion being immediately caricatured by opportunistic outrageous-mongers.

According to a study published in The Journal of the Royal Society Interface, scientists have found that whilst mass connectivity through social media and the internet makes us look smarter, in fact, it might be making us stupider.

It's not about spending time doing something unproductive like watching a video or playing a game that only represents time that could have been invested, let's say, reading a book and actually learning something. However, the greater problem seems to be the human tendency to copy others.

Copying other people led humanity to become more adaptable, It helped us to acquire information very quick. But we might be careful of what we are really copying.

According to the results of the study, social networking may not be making you smarter. In fact, it may be making you dumber by providing you with answers and ideas without requiring any real thinking, so that your analytical powers are being consumed like an unused muscle.

The researchers said:

The bias may very well decrease the frequency of analytical reasoning by making it easy and commonplace for people to reach analytical response without engaging analytical processing.” In the long-term, they warn, “increased connectivity may eventually make us stupid by making us smarter first.

These platforms were meant to connect people from all over the world in a very easy way, spread information, among others. All those things look and feel easier to do with social media, but we have not realized how extremely dependent is our society on social media.

Facebook have originally been promoted as "college addiction". Today, some researchers say that Facebook addiction has become a reality. In addition, as Facebook is only one of many networking sites, the term "social networking addiction" would seem more appropriate.

It has been convincingly argued that overuse of social networks leads to symptoms associated with addiction. This includes worrying about these sites, using them to change your mood, needing to use them more and more to get the same effects, and having withdrawal effects when you stop using them that often cause you to start using them again. This is highly related to dopamine, according to some researchers:

Dopamine is generated every time someone likes or comments on a photo or post, and that results in people getting more and more involved in the platform.

A poll published by the megazine Times states that the obsession with social media is correlated with higher levels of unhappiness. People are so obsessed with trying to look like people online that their own happiness is diminishing and the struggle to look like their favorite accounts at Instagram is quickly hitting people's self-confidence.

Our intelligence, sexual orientation, tastes, likes —and much more—can be computed from our Facebook likes. Machines, using data are better judges of our personality and know even more of us than our friends and family. Soon, artificial intelligence, using our social network data, will know even more. Networks like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are dedicated to capturing and selling our attention. This has come at a cost, both personal and political, that no one mentions or even consents to.

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How free are we today?

If Facebook were a Nation, it would be the country with the largest population in the world and the Government that knows more about their own citizens. Facebook records everything that you have ever posted on the platform, and also what you have deleted. If that were not enough Facebook owns Whatsapp, so they have the record of your call history, all the messages that you have sent, and to whom.

Both Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 saw a dystopian future in which individuals were stripped of their freedom, but the mechanism of that theft differed: Where Orwell saw a Soviet-style oligarchy hiding truth and police behavior, Huxley imagined that no one would care about the truth and would choose to let entertainment define their actions, just like the social media.

When Huxley returned to these themes in a nonfiction book 30 years later, he observed that the world was rapidly resembling the fantasy he had imagined, saying that anyone who opposed tyranny "did not take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". All this was before the Internet and mobile devices put social networking in everyone's hands.

The worlds of Instagram and Facebook is so similar to the drug-induced dreamworld of SOMA. People spend many hours on social media every day and their exaltation of self-expression is reinforced by feedback from friends and strangers. The most insignificant aspects of everyone's life are as significant as they are equal. We are connected, and we are never alone.

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Meanwhile, the real world is changing beyond our ability to perceive it directly. The social media campaign sell us the idea that spending more time online will do connect us to reality in a direct and unfiltered way that has never been possible before. This is one of the biggest lies of postmodernism.

It connects us to a virtual world, where content is shared. Posing for a self is just an image on a piece of hardware; it's not something that other people can experience until they climb onto a platform where other images exist. The video of a political protest is no different from the video of a dumb cat since everything is contained in a shared virtual space.

This virtuality (literally "something that is, but is not") is infinitely powerful. We can say what we want and see and hear what we choose. Everything that makes sense is defined by what we decide individually and can ignore anything else; in fact, our exposure to content is technically separated from the context of where, how and by whom it is loaded, so our experiences are not defined by reality, but by what we and others decide is real.

We didn't get the world we have because we did. We're too busy with our imagined versions to worry about. A brave new world.