Scheinbaum,is an associate professor of marketing as Clemson University.
As an expert in consumer behavior, I recently edited a book about how social media affects mental health.
I’m also a big fan of Taylor Swift.
So when I listened to Swift’s latest album, “ The Tortured Poets Department,” I couldn’t help but notice parallels to the research that I’ve been studying for the past decade.
It might seem like an outlandish comparison. What can the bestselling album of 2024 have to do with research into the dark side of social media?
But bear with me: Taylor Swift lives in the same social media-saturated universe as the rest of us. That may be why the melancholic themes of her album resonate with so many people.
With young people out of school for the summer and spending free time on social media, now is a time to put on some tunes and think about mental health and what is called “consumer well-being” in the transformative consumer research area of scholarship.
Here are three Taylor-made takeaways that shed light on some of the themes in my latest edited book, “ The Darker Side of Social Media: Consumer Psychology and Mental Health.”
Lesson 1: Modern life through the social media lens can get you down
If you’ve been feeling out of sorts lately, you’re hardly alone: Anxiety and depression can be exacerbated by overuse of social media, research summarized in Chapter 1 shows. And social media use is on the rise.
The average American teenager spends nearly five hours every day scrolling TikTok, Instagram and the like, polling shows, while adults clock more than two hours a day on social media. Such could be compulsive social media use and overall overuse.
Digital life can simulate addiction and sometimes manifest as a distinct form of anxiety called “disconnection anxiety,” researchers Line Lervik-Olsen, Bob Fennis and Tor Wallin Andreassen note in their book chapter on compulsive social media use. This can breed feelings of depression – a mood that recurs throughout “The Tortured Poets Department.”
Oftentimes, depression goes hand in hand with feelings of loneliness. Social media has, in some ways, made people feel even lonelier – nearly 4 in 5 Americans say that social media has made social divisions worse, according to Pew Research. In our book chapter, my graduate student Betül Dayan and I consider the prevalence of loneliness in the digital world.
The pandemic showed the world that social media relationships can’t replace physical company. Even celebrities with hundreds of millions of followers simply want someone to be with. In the song “The Prophecy,” Swift sings of loneliness and wanting someone who simply enjoys her presence:
Don’t want money/ Just someone who wants my company ( “The Prophecy”)
Lesson 2: Comparisons will make you miserable
Social media is a breeding ground for comparisons. And since people tend to portray idealized versions of themselves on social media – rather than their authentic selves – these comparisons are often false or skewed. Research has shown that people on social media tend to make “upward comparisons,” judging themselves relative to people they find inspiring. Social media can breed false comparisons, as what someone is aspiring to may not be authentic.
This can lead to what researchers call a “negative self-discrepancy” – a sense of disappointment with one’s failure to meet a personal ideal. As researchers Ashesh Mukherjee and Arani Roy note in their book chapter, social media makes people more dissatisfied with their own sense of control, intelligence and power. This, in turn, can worsen stress and anxiety.
The theme of comparisons comes through loud and clear in the song “ The Tortured Poets Department,” in which Swift castigates a partner with literary pretensions – and herself for dating him. Swift may be the most rich, famous and successful pop star on the planet, but comparing yourself with even more heroic figures is sure to make anyone feel worse:
You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith. This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots. ( “The Tortured Poets Department”)
Lesson 3: Bullying isn’t a minor problem
In today’s social media-focused world, bullying has transitioned to online platforms. And arguably, platforms breed bullying: People are more likely to engage in cruel behavior online than they would face to face.
Policymakers increasingly recognize bullying as an important political concern. In their book chapter, researchers Madison Brown, Kate Pounders and Gary Wilcox have examined laws intended to fight bullying.
One such effort, the Kids Online Safety Act, which among other things would require online platforms to take steps to address cyberbullying, recently passed the U.S. Senate.
Lawmakers aren’t the only ones taking bullying seriously. In her latest album, Swift refers to bullies in her own life as vipers who “disgrace her good name” and who say insults that stick with her for a long time. Themes of reputation and bullying have run throughout Swift’s entire body of work – hardly surprising for someone who has lived such a public life, both online and off.
I’ll tell you something ’bout my good name. It’s mine alone to disgrace. I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing. ( “But Daddy I Love Him”)
It is not known whether overall social media use or overuse alone causes some of these outcomes, but our research does demonstrate that in many ways there’s a darker side to social media when it comes to consumer well-being – even for celebrities. So if you’re going to see the Eras Tour in Europe this summer, you might want to leave your phone back at the hotel.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.