Social media platforms stopped being just a technological tool for keeping distant people in touch a long time ago. They are now a multi-armed laboratory and a wide testing ground for brain researchers and behavioural scientists.
Those researchers could write books that would fill a fleet of trucks large enough to cause a traffic jam on every interstate highway in the United States, and still they would not succeed in understanding what on earth goes through the minds of users who film themselves jumping from the fifth floor of a shopping mall onto a small trampoline on the ground floor with no safety net, hitting it and bouncing back up without cracking their heads open, just to rack up more than twenty million views. And the far worse thing is that they received applause instead of immediate arrest and referral for psychiatric evaluation with a recommendation for involuntary hospitalisation, so they could continue living safely as anonymous individuals instead of attempting the next insane challenge.
