What risk are we radically underestimating as a species? What are we overestimating?I think we’ve still underestimated the harms of scrolling. I am careful to say “scrolling” because I don’t think social media is itself a bad thing, nor do I think screens are uniformly bad. I think it’s specifically the act of scrolling, which forces us to ingest, process, and respond to an insane firehose of ideas. I don’t think all this micro-context switching is good for us; we’re collectively destroying our attention. Most people know the feeling when they’ve scrolled too much and it makes them feel kind of exhausted and bad, yet for some reason, suggesting that something should be done about this behavior – I’m still agnostic as to what – makes people upset and defensive. I think being perpetually distracted as a species is a very bad thing, and it has downstream effects on everything else

What risk are we radically underestimating as a species? What are we overestimating?

I think we’ve still underestimated the harms of scrolling. I am careful to say “scrolling” because I don’t think social media is itself a bad thing, nor do I think screens are uniformly bad. I think it’s specifically the act of scrolling, which forces us to ingest, process, and respond to an insane firehose of ideas. I don’t think all this micro-context switching is good for us; we’re collectively destroying our attention. Most people know the feeling when they’ve scrolled too much and it makes them feel kind of exhausted and bad, yet for some reason, suggesting that something should be done about this behavior – I’m still agnostic as to what – makes people upset and defensive. I think being perpetually distracted as a species is a very bad thing, and it has downstream effects on everything else

Nadia Asparouhova • Nadia Asparouhova on antimemetics, nuclear mysticism, and scrolling

Saved by sari and

RelatedCollections

How Harmful Is Social Media?

The New Yorker newyorker.com

I think digital scrolling induces a kind of blackout. Not in the way alcohol causes one, but in the sense that time disappears without anything worth remembering. There are days I can barely recall—not because they were traumatic, but because they were simply unmemorable. A digital fog. Hours passed without touching anything real. No texture. No de... See more

Remember that the number of seconds in your day never changes. The amount of social media content competing for those seconds, however, doubles every year or so, depending on how you measure it. Imagine, for instance, that your network produces 200 posts a day of which you have time to read about 100. Because of the platform's tilt, you will see t

Max Fisher • The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World a book by Max Fisher

Present-mindedness is our biggest danger. Forget all the handwringing about our social habits; I doubt technology is turning us into much bigger narcissists than we already were. And politically, tech has had many wonderful effects—particularly when long-ignored voices have learned how to connect and persuade online

Clive Thompson • Social media is keeping us stuck in the moment

When we strive to be everywhere and do everything, we tend to feel like we’re not fully experiencing anything. If we’re not careful and protective of our attention, it can seem like we’re losing control of our lives, bouncing from one distraction to the next... A common example of heroic individualism’s futile efforts to get more done faster at the... See more

Brad Stulberg • The Practice of Groundedness: A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds--Not Crushes--Your Soul

If we don’t change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where “there’s going to be an upper class of people that are very aware” of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with “fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they’re going to be living more and

How Harmful Is Social Media?

Max Fisher • The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World a book by Max Fisher

Clive Thompson • Social media is keeping us stuck in the moment

Brad Stulberg • The Practice of Groundedness: A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds--Not Crushes--Your Soul

Johann Hari • Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention And How to Think Deeply Again