I’ve been wondering why the women I’ve been interviewing are still using Facebook so much. Research on 16-18 year olds in London found that it is basically dead to them. Yet most of the women I’m interviewing (who are between 18-24) are still looking at Facebook a lot: often the first app they’re looking at after they wake up. This doesn’t mean they’re enjoying it – on the contrary they talk a lot about how its become boring, a routine. They’re also using a lot of other platforms – WhatsApp, SMS, Instagram – so its not a question of being loyal to a particular platform.

Reading a brilliant article about Addictive Technologies illuminated this issue for me in that it talks about how the platform is engineered to get you addicted to the ‘serotonin’ it emulates.

“Facebook doesn’t just want to catalyze interactions. It wants to catalyze emotions. It wants you to have the same feelings–the positive ones at least–that you have when you cuddle up to friends and family in person. The company shorthand for this is “serotonin,” the neurotransmitter that sparks feelings of happiness.”

There’s lots of theory to help us understand what’s going on here – the technical codes in the design of the software and devices that reflect the cultural horizon of our society, the network effects that pulled the women onto Facebook in the first place – but this is an opportunity for a reflexive moment. I need to look more deeply at what we’re doing when we choose to look at a particular app, fiddle about with something on our phones, check Twitter again for a little serotonin buzz. I want to understand how these urges and ‘addictions’ then impact on decisions we make about what else we are doing with our phones; how much we spend on them and why we choose particular devices over others.