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Studying Contemporary Media Change: A Psychosocial Framework

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EXPLAINER @jorgebscomm for @empowervmedia Photo: Nigel Foote via Pexels · Pexels License Media environments influence what becomes visible, how information is interpreted and which meanings circulate. Understanding these processes requires examining psychological judgement alongside social relationships, culture and institutional power. I magine a public issue receiving attention through a newspaper report, a short social-media video and a conversation between friends. The underlying event may be the same, but each encounter offers different information, emphasises different details and invites different interpretations. The report reflects editorial decisions. The video reaches people through a distribution system. The conversation introduces personal experiences, relationships and expectations. If the issue becomes publicly prominent, institutions may also respond to the attention it receives. This raises a broader ques...
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Zuckerberg vs. Reality: Meta’s Secret War on Self-Esteem

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@jorgebscomm for @empowervmedia [Image credit: raportuldegarda.ro ] I n 2021, an Instagram employee created a false account posing as a thirteen-year-old girl searching for diet tips. Within minutes, the algorithm was surfacing accounts titled "skinny binge" and "apple core anorexic". The employee documented what she found. It was not a surprise to her colleagues — internal research had been saying this for years. What made the moment extraordinary was that the documents eventually reached the public, courtesy of whistleblower Frances Haugen, and were published by the Wall Street Journal in September 2021 . They revealed something the company had worked hard to avoid saying publicly: Instagram knew it was making things worse. "We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls."  — Internal Meta slide presentation, 2019 . What the internal documents showed The leaked presentations — reviewed across an 18-month window from 2019 — we...
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Location: Australia
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The Personality Architects of Digital Dependence: Who Gets Hooked on Facebook, and Why?

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Digital dependence is a public health crisis accelerated by platform design exploiting our core personalities.   (📷:choosehelp) T he landscape of modern life is inextricably woven with online social networks, a phenomenon exemplified by the massive scale of global engagement. Today, approximately 4.8 billion people worldwide are actively utilising social media platforms , a figure that reflects the unparalleled success of platforms like Facebook in providing connection and information. Yet, embedded within this massive user base is a burgeoning crisis of digital dependency, known scientifically as Problematic Facebook Use (PFU) or Facebook Use Disorder (FUD). This is not merely frequent engagement but a pattern of functional impairment characterised by addiction-like symptoms: a manifest inability to control usage, the experience of withdrawal when disconnected, the neglect of important real-world activities in favour of screen time, and ultimately, facing significant negative con...
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Location: Australia
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