The Unsocial Media: How Online Apps Rearrange Our Social Experience

It is not easy being a parent to an 8-month-old baby boy, while working 40 hours a week and balancing a full-time student schedule with the intentions of earning a Bachelor’s Degree this Spring. My dense schedule has left me exhausted and lethargic to the point that when I finally have time for myself with my wife, going to the store for essentials or making dinner is an insurmountable endeavor that neither of us unwilling to take. However, thanks to our smartphones and the world wide web, these pesky chores are relegated to a button push and a delivery fee.

There is a certain luxury that comes from picking up your phone while comfortably laying on the couch, half paying attention to whatever television rerun is on in the background, ordering dinner delivered to your door through an app and not having to converse with anyone the entire time.

This modern convenience has demonstrated the effectiveness of our current technology as instant gratification becomes the key metric of success in any service app. This is due to a neurological response as our spending habits are not rational but emotionally driven and online apps know how to manipulate our psyche to always want things now.

According to an article from BigThink.com entitled “Instant Gratification: The Neuroscience of Impulse Buying,” author Stephanie Johnson explains, “Stress triggers the release of cortisol, a hormone that helps us respond quickly and effectively to threats in our environment. In the modern and developed world, the stressors we face often are not physical but psychological, and businesses capitalize on this.”

However, these types of services are also detrimental to our ability to develop social skills as the reliance on digital applications can make individuals more antisocial, which was seen during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

DoorDash has been seeing an increase in revenue since 2020. The food delivery service app has been used by 20 million consumers, 450,000 merchants and made 816 million deliveries in 2020 alone, according to Morley Swindells of Earthweb in his article “DoorDash Statistics: How Many People Use DoorDash.”

The current trend has not subsided as the pandemic has led to an increase in hermit-like behavior that has quickly become the new normal within our current society. Regardless of services and delivery fees that increase the price of a standard Taco Bell order from $10 to $25, the convenience charges outweigh having to start a car, and waiting in the drive-thru line.

Tiana Williams is a student at California State University, Long Beach, who has continually utilized the DoorDash service to help her quell the nuisance of picking up her fast food.

“It is not the most responsible way to use my money, but I enjoy ordering food and having it at my door while I do other things around the house or if I just want to relax,” Williams said.

Williams also suffers from Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), a neurological disorder that is a form of chronic pain that lasts indefinitely within her arms and torso. Services like DoorDash help her mitigate extremely sensitive nerves from further pain caused by loud noises, wind and movement. Although the disorder has been detrimental to her way of life, Williams can enjoy her favorite foods with minimal discomfort.

“It has been a struggle, but it is nice to have a comforting meal sent to me while I rest and get to watch my favorite shows uninterrupted,” Williams said.

In the last 25 years since its creation, Amazon has become the biggest ecommerce platform on the planet. The online store has about 213 million U.S. visitors a month with a net revenue of $11.59 billion dollars, according to Christo Petrov of TechJury.

The worldwide distribution of home improvement products, with more than 12 million products to choose from, the need for essential products by leaving the house to a brick-and-mortar store is almost obsolete.

Kristina Williams is a new mother who has used the Amazon ecommerce platform in order to save time that she uses to take care of her newborn son. “It has become a lifesaver in most instances since I have very limited time to do anything else after I put my baby to sleep,” Williams said.

Although Williams prefers to go to the store in-person, having a baby complicates trips or even trying to find time alone to go, since she is still being cautious during the ongoing pandemic.

“I would like to go to Target or the grocery store, but it’s hard to find time and have someone watch my baby boy since I don’t want to risk his exposure to COVID and want to keep him safe,” Williams said. “That is why I like Amazon to get quick essentials that I need for the house.”

The convenience of selecting food and products from an app has also given that same ease to the world of dating. The methods of confronting individuals in-person and becoming vulnerable by asking strangers to hang out at the movies has become a relic of the past.

Dating has never been easier with apps like Tinder and Bumble that have taken away the rigors of first-person impressions and quantified them with filtered pictures with brief descriptions of likes or dislikes. In 2021, the dating app industry made over $5 billion dollars in revenue and has over 323 million users across all the most popular platforms, according to David Curry of Business of Apps in his article “Dating App Revenue and Usage Statistics.”

However, these apps that are more like couch potato speed dating have been used to replace a form of physical validation. In a 2017 study of Tinder, over 70 percent of users said they had never met up with one of their matches in real life, and 44 percent said they used the app purely for “confidence-boosting procrastination.”

In her article “Swipe Right for Loneliness: On the Gamification of Dating Apps,” Nancy Jo Sales discusses the perils of addiction in dating apps and how the quick rush of acceptance can lead to unfulfilling relationships. “After your brain gets that little high of a dopamine spike, an inevitable dip follows; there’s a low; and so, it isn’t surprising that more than half of singles report feeling lonely after swiping on dating apps,” Sales writes.

The utilization of service apps has been a reactionary move that was normalized during the lockdown months and early stages of the emerging Coronavirus in 2020. However, this convenience has led to those reluctant to participate in society even more anxious to join, as a need to commingle has been seen as unnecessary with our current trend of online services.

Kira M. Newman in her article “How Pandemic Fatigue Has Made Us Antisocial,” describes that “Loneliness, rather than prompting us to connect, actually makes us withdraw, according to research. We start to feel unworthy of our relationships, worried that people are judging us or don’t enjoy being around us.”

The purpose of service apps is to ease the stress of everyday life and enhance one’s ability to thrive from the comfort of our own homes, but they can also inhibit our ability to socialize. These service apps and the instant gratification lifestyle they afford may benefit the already introverted, but they can also discourage others from emerging from their cocoons to rejoin society because they make it easy not to have to.