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Social Media
"Social media refers to online platforms that people use to connect with others who share their interests. Social media users post and exchange different types of media, including images, blog posts, videos, direct and group messages, podcasts, newsletters, music, and links to external websites. Social networking sites are a form of social media platform in which users actively engage with their peers, followers, and the public.
The popularity of social media has sparked concern over user privacy and safety as well as its social and political impact. Social media's effect on users' mental health and well-being, particularly among young users, and its potential for compulsive use, has also raised alarm and sparked calls for regulatory intervention. Further, social media companies like other technology firms have become increasingly economically and politically influential.
Critics have also expressed concern about social media companies from foreign countries, particularly China, and how their data collection methods may threaten US interests. To address issues that have arisen from social media's growth, some politicians and activists have called for these tech companies to be regulated, sold or broken up into smaller companies, and in some cases banned from operating in the United States."
"Social Media." Gale Opposing Viewpoints Online Collection, Gale, 2025. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/PC3010999130/OVIC?u=viva2_nvcc&sid=bookmark-OVIC&xid=aff437f3.
You can use memes, infographics, and other discussions on social media to find inspiration for a research question, and then seek credible sources to learn more. See the example below:
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Loss Aversion and Evidence Accumulation in Short-Video Addiction: A Behavioral and Neuroimaging InvestigationLiu, Chang et al. "Loss Aversion and Evidence Accumulation in Short-Video Addiction: A Behavioral and Neuroimaging Investigation." NeuroImage, vol. 313, 2025. ScienceDirect.
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How to Break up with Your Phone
by
Do you feel addicted to your phone? Do you frequently pick it up “just to check,” only to look up forty-five minutes later wondering where the time has gone? Does social media make you anxious? Have you tried to spend less time mindlessly scrolling—and failed? If so, this book is your solution. In How to Break Up with Your Phone, award-winning health and science journalist and TED speaker Catherine Price presents an evidence-based hands-on 30-day digital detox guide to breaking up—and then making up—with your phone. The goal: better mental health, improved screen-life balance, and a long-term relationship with technology that feels good.Now fully revised to reflect advances in the technological landscape, this groundbreaking book features new expert advice and research on the science of addiction, with expanded chapters explaining how social media and algorithms are designed to addict us, impairing our abilities to focus, think deeply, and form new memories; and an updated section on the unique dangers social media poses to children, with brand-new tips on how to protect them.
Neuroplasticity
"Neuroplasticity is the process by which the brain grows and develops, changes throughout life, and compensates for injury from accidents, stroke, or other brain-damaging events.
There are three stages of neuroplasticity:
- brain growth, organization, and reorganization that occurs during fetal development and throughout childhood and adolescence into young adulthood;
- ongoing learning and memory formation that occurs throughout adulthood;
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regaining of functionality, compensating, or maximizing remaining functionality following injury to the brain.
In the final decades of the twentieth century, scientists believed that adult brains lost most of their youthful malleability and, with the ongoing death of neurons (nerve cells), slowly deteriorated with age. However, it is now clear that the brain is a dynamic organ that undergoes changes in structure and function—rewires itself—throughout life. New neurons form throughout life, albeit at a slower rate in adults than in the young, new connections (synapses) between neurons are made continually, and new neural pathways are forged."
Longe, Jacqueline L., editor. “Neuroplasticity.” Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology, 3rd ed., Gale, 2016. Credo Reference, search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6NDc3MTYzMQ==?aid=98275.
You can use memes, infographics, and other discussions on neuroplasticity to find inspiration for a research question, and then seek credible sources to learn more. See the example below:
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The Tapestry of Neuroplasticity: Rewiring Our BrainMiller, John J. “The Tapestry of Neuroplasticity: Rewiring Our Brain.” Psychiatric Times, vol. 42, no. 1, Jan. 2025, pp. 9–10. EBSCOhost, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=37e7528a-fcf6-34cb-80d1-3092929912f0.
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Livewired
by
The greatest technology we have ever discovered on our planet is the three-pound organ carried in the vault of the skull. This book is not simply about what the brain is; it is about what it does. The magic of the brain is not found in the parts it's made of but in the way those parts unceasingly reweave themselves in an electric, living fabric. In Livewired, you will surf the leading edge of neuroscience atop the anecdotes and metaphors that have made David Eagleman one of the best scientific translators of our generation. Covering decades of research to the present day, Livewired also presents new discoveries from Eagleman's own laboratory, from synesthesia to dreaming to wearable neurotech devices that revolutionize how we think about the senses.
