Watches and clocks added to the de-humanizing time pressures on factory workers to be productive. Radio and television were organized around the advertising that enabled modern consumer culture and heightened people’s status anxieties.

Inevitably, the critics have shifted their focus onto digital technology. There has been considerable commentary about whether internet use in general and social media use in particular are related to higher levels of stress.1 Such analysts often suggest that it is the heaviest users of these technologies that are most at risk. Critics fear that these technologies take over people’s lives, creating time pressures that put people at risk for the negative physical and psychological health effects that can result from stress.

• Overall, frequent internet and social media users do not have higher levels of stress. In fact, for women, the opposite is true for at least some digital technologies. Holding other factors constant, women who use Twitter, email and cellphone picture sharing report lower levels of stress.

• At the same time, the data show there are circumstances under which the social use of digital technology increases awareness of stressful events in the lives of others. Especially for women, this greater awareness is tied to higher levels of stress and it has been called “the cost of caring.” Stress is not associated with the frequency of people’s technology use, or even how many friends users have on social media platforms. But there is one way that people’s use of digital technology can be linked to stress: Those users who feel more stress are those whose use of digital tech is tied to higher levels of awareness of stressful events in others’ lives. This finding about “the cost of caring” adds to the evidence that stress is contagious.4 How can it be that social media use is not directly associated with stress, but for some, social media use can still lead to higher levels of stress?

In the field of anthropology, “Social Instinct” is the innate tendency or impulse of a group to come together. It is the interchange that happens within a community of people that influences the way they form and behave – the sharing of views, experiences, expressions, and values – often driven by language and culture. “Social Instinct” is the “why” behind their desire to gather and come together. We believe that the better

Social Instinct is a social media moderation and management platform.

How It Works

Social Instinct plugs into social media platforms, quickly ingesting and processing multiple types of user-generated content (UGC). Text posts, images, and video are passed through our platform, where it scores the content as positive or negative. Once processed, the curated content is then pushed to you on a custom dashboard for either promotion or remediation. Snapshot