Are You Addicted to Facebook? 

Mark Fisher’s concept of depressive hedonia  

This is the process of people self-medicating to cope with the disappearance of the future and commodification, our coping mechanisms for dealing with this are through consuming hedonic media.  

The psychology behind this – can be explained when looking at human’s responses when there is more food around. There instinct is to consume more – this explains why we are compulsively looking at pictures of food and friends – there is a hedonic value.   

People consume drugs because it is addictive, people smoke when they know it is bad for them, people eat candy when they know it will destroy their teeth, but we do all of this anyway despite what we know. - because the feel good factor of consuming these things outweighs the self control we have to be healthy.  

social media however, is a more efficient version of junk food and tobacco – because it is harder to identify the way it is affecting you - people are unaware that social media makes them feel depressed so there is nothing stopping them from consuming it.  

Someone using social media as a temporary solution and a distraction will result in them feeling worse and needing more distraction. So they will emerce themselves in more social media to fill this void unaware this is what’s causing them to feel worse.