what is Social Media doing to us?

From 2002-2006, social media companies emerged with the explicit mission of "connecting the world," but the introduction of the feed and the like, plus the switch from friends to " followers " indicated a different pitch: "now, even you can a star."

And while the outcome of overusing an app on the phone may not look as physically dangerous, what it has done to my attention, self esteem, and zest for life is just as dark as what alcohol did to me.

I do think that social media is largely a trap... for users and for brands. It’s purposely built to create insecurity and false proxies, metrics that get people to work for free to support the business model of the social media companies, as opposed to their own goals.

When Wendy’s or Oreo cookies pulls some sort of stunt on a social media platform,... See more

For example, a small study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard looked at the IQ of some of their workers in two situations. At first they tested their IQ when they were not being distracted or interrupted. Then they tested their IQ when they were receiving emails and phone calls. The study found that ‘technological distraction’ – just getting emails

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First, be clear about your intentions. For myself, I want to maximize learning and improving myself, and minimize “zombie entertainment”. This is when we’re caught in a pattern of consuming from a firehose feed for entertainment, without intentionality. It’s a fake flow state: time passes quickly and the world fades away, but there’s no cognitive... See more

the game of social media is to keep us creating assets that depreciate in hours. If they took months to depreciate, we wouldn’t use the platform as much. But because it’s hours, we “need” to spend more and more and more and more of our time on the platform for it to work for us.