A közösségi média a fogyasztó társadalom terméke. Lélektani okok és következmények

Social media platforms act as market forces competing for our time, attention, and data—essentially, this is how we “pay” for their services. However, this comes at a significant cost. This study seeks to explore the psychological phenomena that social media exploits to achieve its business objectives and examines the psychological consequences of these practices, as reflected in international research. The paper aims to help understand why and how excessive use of social media, while supporting ego-defense mechanisms, leads to addiction, anxiety, and disturbances in self-image. It investigates the causes of aggressive tendencies associated with social media usage and examines how superficial and rapid information consumption reshapes cognitive processing systems, including attention, memory, and decision-making processes. Additionally, the study reviews the communicative phenomena and social-psychological impacts that accompany excessive social media use, such as social comparison, changes in patterns of social behavior, cyberbullying, echo chambers, opinion bubbles, lack of empathy, and cancel culture, as well as their effects on users’ mental and physical health