Published Paper Details:

The pervasive influence of social media has brought about an onslaught of perceived sociocultural norms, and by proxy, it has blurred the lines of decorum, identity, and information. The mirage of illusory perceptions has at its source human beings' need for constant validity. This paper delves into the multifaceted impacts of society's reliance on social media and online interaction on the real world and people's selves by examining the lack of identity, media literacy, and the steep decline in friendship in recent generations following millennials. One area of exploration is the influence of social media on identity formation. This paper analyses how the prevalence of personality tests shapes self-perception, and how the phenomena of Buzzfeed personality tests fade into the enigma of mental health questionnaires and the emerging culture of shallow self-diagnoses. Examining these phenomena aims to elucidate the metaverse's impact on an individual's self-perception. The paper further investigates society's overwhelming reliance on the digital realm, its inability to bounce back from the said reliance, and its associated desensitizations since COVID-19. The toxic culture of online solace is promoted by the media companies that host them. The main goal of social media platforms is to keep users on their apps for as long as possible to collect more data and to show more advertisements. Social media companies take advantage of triggering people's emotions to do so. Given that anger is the strongest emotion, social media algorithms try to provoke users by using content with high shock value. High shock value content is often intense and misleading, leading to identity politics and disturbing phenomena such as conspiracy theories and in extreme cases, abetting genocide. This paper seeks to unravel the implications of these phenomena on both online interactions and broader societal dynamics. In conclusion, this paper aims to investigate social media's manipulation of its users' neurochemical and psychological processes as a means of preserving user engagement on their platforms. It also examines the anthropological impact of social media in a modern post-covid era through an evaluation of the current status quo in corporate methodology, primal human behaviors, and the intersection of fast-paced metaverse and entertainment.