Justin Joseph

The notion of forbidden fruit comes from the Bible, where Adam and Eve were told to eat from all trees of the Garden of Eden except from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, for it is dangerous and will lead to death. But when tempted by the devil, portraying it as good, delightful and desirable, they couldn’t resist. The “forbidden fruit effect” describes how something becomes more desirable when it’s restricted or unavailable. This could be attributed to all spheres of human life.

Coming to the 21^st century, the most discussed and feared forbidden fruit is the Social Media. This has been one of the most rapidly growing and profitable industry during the last two decades. Social media as we popularly know today, are online social networking platforms which allow it’s users to browse and share content in various forms. From Six Degrees in 1997 being the earliest recognized social media website to blogs in the 2000s, we have come off a long way. The shift really began with Facebook, Twitter (now X) and YouTube from 2005 onwards. The innovations and growth in this field has been rapid. WhatsApp, Instagram, snapchat, TikTok, WeChat, Reddit etc has been at the forefront of all this.

The contributing factors:  The most prominent has been the ‘like’ feature (more than comments and share) introduced in 2009 in Facebook, which became a wildfire and was adapted into other platforms pretty soon. Another fuel to the fire was technological advancements of the smartphones. This made social media readily available and accessible. Improved technology and reduced-price ranges of the phones, more innovative features and utilities on the platforms, with wide recognition and power assumed through social media, propelled everyone to be a content creator. This raw user content attraction, potential financial benefits and assumed popularity status, made social media as the oxygen of modern day lives.

Benefits

Being connected with many people at the same time is the biggest benefit. Unlike before, now one could share anything one wants to anyone, anywhere, anytime (including live streaming). One can access and be updated on anything at anytime as well.

Immense growth of human networking, knowledge sharing, branding, marketing, communication are all done through social media these days. In fact, there are new business models which are riding only on these social media platforms. No company however small or big can think of marketing in today’s world without a proper Social Media Marketing (SMM) strategy. Personal income generated from platforms like YouTube has made it attractive even as a career path.

Drawbacks

Having all those benefits and many more, social media has its own share of curse on human life and society at large. It is more becoming like a DIGITAL EPIDEMIC or addiction which is spreading and deepening by the day. The problem is that social media is designed to be addictive, it capitalizes on our neurological tendencies. When we check our notifications, our brains become hooked on the dopamine that is released. The unreliable nature of notifications makes them all the more addictive; when a reward is unexpected our brains become obsessive, anticipating when we might get the next hit. Then there is FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) — reinforces the need to check in constantly, feeding that “just one bite” temptation.

Platforms offer insight into others’ lives and a mirror for self-reflection (or projection). Users become obsessed with their own image; a curation of identity. This also leads to comparison, anxiety, and many suffer from cyber bullying, obsessive addictive behaviour, phantom sensations and most of all one enters and lives in a virtual world where nothing is safe or secure.

Additionally, the concept of the sociometer describes how our brains are hard-wired to crave validation; and social media makes this easier, allowing us (to our own detriment) to quantify our worth in the number of likes or notifications we receive each day. Like any other addictions, uncontrolled use from very young age is causing developmental disorders. Brain rot is not just a trending phrase, social media really is shrinking the grey matter in our brains.

Suppression or Formation?

So, how do we deal with this? Many think that the solution is to bring in restrictions. This is exactly what makes the social media the forbidden fruit. Psychologically, reactance theory describes how people are motivated to regain freedom when they perceive it as being restricted, heightening the very behaviours intended to be suppressed. This applies to social media, as the perceived restrictions (e.g., age limits, parental controls, general norms, taboos) can make it more appealing to users, especially adolescents, in addition to desire and curiosity.

The cry for curbing the use and influence of various types of social media has been going on for a long time now. Though there are already various restrictions in place, they are easily bypassed. With more awareness programs, listening to expert opinions especially from psychologist, motivational speakers and the like, parents and teachers (getting paranoid even) try to suppress the use of social media among kids and teenagers in particular sometimes forcefully, and this is causing reactance, or the forbidden fruit effect. Added to this, law restrictions like that of Australia and US state of Florida is causing concerns in this same line.

It is scientifically -psychologically- proven (B.F. Skinner, Festinger, APA, Jean Twenge’s research, The Facebook Files) that unrestricted use of social media and gadgets are causing lot of social, psychological and physical abnormalities among kids including high levels of anxiety, depression, violence and sociopathic behaviours. Just restricting the use of social media alone wouldn’t do the trick. Parents have to be educated to avoid screens for children upto 3 years and smartphones upto 6-7 years of age. Social Media education must be given at various levels for kids and teenagers. Above all, a crackdown upon the snake in the forbidden fruit story, here the companies like Meta, have to be cautioned and sanctioned legally in this long-term effort to save humanity from the effects of having taken a bite from this Forbidden Fruit.