Veritatis Gaudium: Multidisciplinary Journal of Postgraduate Studies

The expansion of new media technologies has fundamentally reshaped contemporary social behavior, modes of communication, and educational practices. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, and X (formerly Twitter) now function not merely as tools of interaction but as environments within which identity, knowledge, and social relations are constituted. While these platforms provide opportunities for collaboration, access to information, and global connectivity, their excessive and compulsive use has generated a phenomenon widely conceptualized as social media addiction. This paper examines, from a philosophical perspective, the impact of social media addiction on academic performance and social structures. Adopting a philosophical discourse approach, the study interrogates the ontological, epistemological, and ethical implications of digital dependency. It argues that social media addiction reshapes human attention, temporality, rationality, and being-with-others, thereby transforming both individual consciousness and collective organization. Drawing on media dependency theory, technological determinism, critical theory, and existential phenomenology, the paper explores how new media reconstitutes the conditions of knowing, learning, and social existence. The analysis demonstrates that compulsive social media engagement undermines academic performance through cognitive fragmentation, temporal distortion, motivational erosion, and the commodification of attention. Beyond education, social media addiction restructures social life by transforming interpersonal relations, authority, identity formation, and community cohesion. It normalizes performative identities, weakens authentic sociality, and installs algorithmic governance over human agency. The paper concludes that social media addiction is not merely a psychological habit but a philosophical problem concerning freedom, autonomy, and the meaning of social existence in a technologically mediated world. It recommends critical digital literacy, institutional responsibility, ethical technology design, and reflective self-discipline as necessary strategies for restoring balance between technological mediation and human flourishing.

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