“Ding!”
“Deedle, deedle, deedle”
“Beedleleep!”
Oh goody! I just got a text, sms, email, voicemail, facebook, twitter, instagram, snapchat, flashvote… ANNDDDDD I got a tiny shot of endorphin too! Or maybe a itty bitty boost of dopamine, or serotonin. Yummy! Do it again! Do it again!
Hmmmmfff.
Won’t SOMEBODY pay attention to me?
“Ding!”
Oh, yeay!
Is social messaging delivering our chemical highs these days? Instead of smoking crack, snorting coke, poppin’ pills, going for a long run, or diving into some great sex, are we all addicted to the tiny boosts of pleasure hormones we get when we see or hear our phones signal “hey, somebody reached out and touched you,”metaphorically speaking?
I posit that that is indeed the case. I bet we get a little boost of happy brain juice every time we see the numbers on our retweets or facebook notifications climb ever upward. They might be nothing but bots or trolls, but just to see those little red flags, dink, dink, dink up the number scale is enough to lift us out of our funk and twist the drip knob on our digital morphine IV ever the more open.
Turn that thing off and put that phone in a drawer!
What? Are you crazy? I’ll go into a detox fit!
No you won’t. Just try it. Just put it away for a weekend. I assure you, when you turn it back on Monday morning, you will have found you didn’t miss all those deedle dees at all.
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 