what is Social Media doing to us?

For many of us, the pandemic didn’t create new factors that ruined our attention – it supercharged the factors that had already been corroding our attention for years. I saw this when I talked with my godson Adam, who I had taken to Memphis. His attention, which had been deteriorating for some time, was now shattered. He was on his phone almost

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A 2021 study revealed that nearly two-thirds of people surveyed believed life was better before social-media platforms, and 42 percent of Gen Z respondents said they felt addicted to social media and couldn’t stop if they tried, even though ‘depressed,’ ‘angry,’ and ‘alone’ were the most common words they associated with Facebook, while ‘missing... See more

Make art, not content https://t.co/HU4Aydurpp

"Unlike the open source movement or Wikipedia, participants of social networks do not seem to follow a common noble goal, or celebrate a community spirit. The focus here lies on the individual." (Dennis Knopf)

the internet is the greatest device for opening up the world ever devised. It is democratising and enabling. But that assumes its users draw on it to aid System 2 thinking. Plainly, there are times when we use it to inform key decisions – to find out about an illness, to research a holiday, to track a scientific breakthrough. But in the main the... See more

Eichhorn uses the potent term “content capital”—a riff on Pierre Bourdieu’s “cultural capital”—to describe the way in which a fluency in posting online can determine the success, or even the existence, of an artist’s work.

“Cultural producers who, in the past, may have focused on writing books or producing films or making art must now also spend... See more

In Walden , his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of ... life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” In Thoreau’s terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it.