Social Media
Essays and more on social media
Packy McCormick and
Social Media
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
... See moreGurwinder • Why Everything Is Becoming a Game
Well, one explanation I liked quite a bit was recently written by Wall Street Journal columnist Christopher Mims, who argued that social media isn’t dying, but changing into broadcast media. The majority of the content we see on a daily basis is now made or shared by a small professional class of users, known as the creator economy. Which is making... See more
Garbage Day • Selling your filter bubble back to you
If you live in the same occidental bubble as me, you might have never heard of WeChat, QQ or VK. Those are immensely popular social networks. In China and Russia. WeChat alone is more or less the size of Instagram in terms of active users. The war in Ukraine also demonstrated that the most popular social network in that part of the world is... See more
Stop Trying to Make Social Networks Succeed
Social media offers the hope of bringing us all together but is often the instrument for tearing us apart.
John Mark Comer • Deliverance: A Journey Toward the Unexpected
In 1995, Putnam was concerned about teens who were alone 3.5 hours per day. But nowadays teens spend up to nine hours daily staring into screens, according to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychology.
Meanwhile, the amount of time spent with friends has dropped markedly The number of social outings has declined too. Almost every metric... See more
Meanwhile, the amount of time spent with friends has dropped markedly The number of social outings has declined too. Almost every metric... See more
Ted Gioia • 8 Ways of Connecting a Smartphone Can't Deliver
Why I don't like algorithmic/filter bubbles/for you feeds:
I refuse to be one thing. I’m two things, three things, a hundred things at once, and I’ll be a hundred different things tomorrow. I don’t want the convenience of being collapsed, defined, optimized for legibility. I want to be aerated, blobby, and porous. I... See more
“Journalists are in general a bunch of insecure overachievers, so being in one ‘room’ with your ‘peers’ giving you constant feedback and information creates a truly awful petri dish in which the most terrible forms of groupthink thrive,” says Polgreen. “It can be very hard to resist for reporters, which makes it tough for editors to reorient their... See more
Someone asked how I manage social media engagement and roll it into practice.
1. Retain full bodily awareness, full field awareness if possible, mindful of all thoughts and feelings arising in reaction at all times while engaging with the glassy simulacrum. Don't collapse in and fixate.
2.... See more
Wystanx.comGamification 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.