Social Media
- we’ve turned everything in life into a giant popularity contest–everything you say, everything you experience, everything you see, and even everything you feel–is a product of a giant worldwide counter of likes and follows. It’s a planet-wide exercise in objective convergence, a giant narcissism amplifier that cynically assumes that competing for m... See more
from About
simon added 1mo ago
We’ve grown so used to the idea that social media is damaging our democracies that we’ve thought very little about how we might build new networks to strengthen societies. We need a wave of innovation around imagining and building tools whose goal is not to capture our attention as consumers, but to connect and inform us as citizens.
from Building a More Honest Internet - Columbia Journalism Review by Ethan Zuckerman
simon added 2mo ago
Social media offers the hope of bringing us all together but is often the instrument for tearing us apart.
from Deliverance: A Journey Toward the Unexpected by Jon Thompson
simon added 2mo ago
Other social media platforms followed, leveraging Skinner’s three laws to maximize button-pecking. They offered immediate reinforcement in the form of instant responses, conditioned reinforcement in the form of “likes” and “followers”, and unpredictable reinforcement that varied with each post and each refresh of the page. These features turned soc
... See morefrom Why Everything Is Becoming a Game by Gurwinder
simon added 2mo ago
Gamification once promised to create a better society, but it’s now used mainly to addict people to apps. The gamifiers, like Skinner’s pigeons, prioritized immediate rewards over delayed ones, so they gamified for the next financial quarter and not for the future of civilization.
from Why Everything Is Becoming a Game by Gurwinder
simon added 2mo ago
- Scrolling through Twitter led to more scrolling and then a feeling of emptiness and guilt for wasting time when I finally managed to leave the app — scrolling through Sublime more often than not led me to putting away my phone, getting a breath of fresh air, and getting to work on that passion project I’d put aside years ago.
Abie Cohen added 3mo ago
Better for you internet
His name is Tristan Harris, a former start-up founder and Google engineer who deviated from his well-worn path through the world of tech to become something decidedly rarer in this closed world: a whistleblower.
“This thing is a slot machine,” Harris says early in the interview while holding up his smartphone.
“How is that a slot machine?” Cooper ask
... See morefrom Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport;
simon added 3mo ago
You might think that bootlicking of this sort is just how you do business in China. But here’s the interesting twist—TikTok doesn’t exist in China.
A similar app, called Douyin, is available in China. TikTok is only for outsiders. And they love it. TikTok has more than 1.5 billion users worldwide.
from Where Did TikTok Come From? by Ted Gioia
simon added 4mo ago
Ritual is vital because it gives us a sense that we belong to the world. A sense of connectedness, whether to society, nature or the divine, is in turn linked to a sense of psychological wholeness and lower rates of mental illness.
Social media offers the opposite; connection without relatedness.
from Myth and Metrics: How Social Media Robs Us of Ritual, and How to Revive It by Alexander Beiner
simon added 4mo ago