Inspired by a discussion among my students a few weeks ago about the role of social media in our daily lives, I wrote a post for a blog in my native language. I wanted to post it on SN as well, so I prepared an English version of the post.

I hope you like it. .________________________________.

The Internet has infiltrated most aspects of our lives. It has changed the way we are informed, entertained and work, it has changed our daily lives, it has changed the way we think and communicate and the way we see ourselves and others. Most of the time we are connected is usually spent on social media, reading news, browsing other people's lives, sharing our own lives, chatting, giving and taking likes, and generally killing time in less creative ways. A look at the statistics is very convincing of how social media has taken its place in our daily routine: Facebook has 1.6 billion daily active users, Instagram 600 million, Twitter 134 million, and so on.

On Facebook, 300 million photos are posted every day, and on Instagram another 95 million, showing everything you can imagine. But they show ourselves or our friends in nice places, doing something nice, feeling nice, or trying to show that we are having a good time. Increasingly, photos of young children or infants are being uploaded by parents who want to share how beautiful and cute their little ones are and how much joy and love they feel when they see them, a phenomenon that has been called "sharenting" and is being debated as to whether it is healthy behavior and whether it can negatively affect the safety and mental health of children. But how did we come to consider it normal to post snapshots of our personal lives and share them with an ever-expanding network of friends, acquaintances, and strangers?

Part of our innate sociality is learning by imitation. Just as a baby learns to behave humanely largely by imitating the behaviors of the adults who care for it, we constantly attune ourselves to socially acceptable behaviors by imitating what those around us are doing, what is most prominent, and what most people seem to like. What is moral, healthy or fun is largely determined by the spirit of the times and social conditions, by the time and place we happen to be born, so today we see videos of cute babies and like them, while in ancient Rome people were seen fighting to the death and celebrating the moment of disembowelment. If my friends post pictures of their newborns and get hearts, why shouldn't I?

Like any other life form, we are products of evolution and natural selection, and our brains have evolved over millions of years to ensure that we are best adapted to our environment and its challenges. Humans have been able to dominate the planet thanks to our highly evolved brains, and one of our most defining and distinctive abilities has been our ability to communicate and cooperate. So our need to connect, to feel accepted and to receive affirmation from others (whether it be a thumbs up, a hug, a clap or an Instagram like) is deeply rooted in the way our brains work because it has served our survival for thousands of years. Being liked makes us feel safe, less lonely and more loved, that our lives are successful and that we are on the road to happiness. And just as we used to project a nice image of ourselves and our lives in the village square, we now project the image we want to project in the digital neighborhood of social media.

But when does the use of social media and its invasion of our lives become dysfunctional and pathological? In my opinion, when we are used by social media instead of using it, when we identify what it appears to be with what it is, and when we ultimately define our self-esteem by the number of likes we get. When our post gets a lot of likes, we feel an intense sense of pleasure as a result of the increase in dopamine levels in our brain's reward system. The same sense of reward can be achieved by reading a book that moves us or by making love, but we usually choose the less strenuous route, and a Facebook post is just that. So we get used to using social media and looking for likes, which often leads us to check our likes every ten minutes, but also to write posts that may not express us but get more likes. Ultimately, this digital reality takes up more and more of our attention, who we appear to be in the digital world seems to be liked more than who we really are, and we end up having no control over how much we use social media and how much it affects how we feel about ourselves.

But how can we protect our children from this obsessive search for attention and approval if we are not aware of it ourselves? First of all, posting photos of our children raises some ethical issues, such as the fact that we are creating a pretty indelible digital footprint of their lives and history without their consent. There are also some risks, extreme but real, such as their photos ending up on child pornography sites. But the most important problem is that we are introducing our children to the world of the Internet and social media at an early age when they have neither a coherent identity, nor a stable self-image, nor the mental maturity needed to process the barrage of information and dopamine rush that the digital social media community offers. Research suggests that the increasing use of social media is associated with an increase in adolescent depression, as teens are unable to cope with their exposure to, and potential rejection by, their digital audiences.

Ultimately, the desire or even the need to share our personal moments, where we are, what we eat, what we think, and how happy we are to be parents, is a kind of Big Brother, a watchful eye that is constantly watching us and judging us to see if we are happy enough. And the strange thing is that, unlike in Orwell's book, we have created this Big Brother, we have given him access to our personal information, and we have assigned him to judge us for not being as happy as our other online friends.