what is Social Media doing to us?
Jerod Morris and
what is Social Media doing to us?
Jerod Morris and
From 2016 onward, the sense of the internet as a transparent information organizing agent has been in decline. After the algorithms, you could not have a curated, chronological feed of your follows. After the Cambridge Analytic scandal, fears over disinformation and misinformation dominated discussions of our new communications technologies. After 2020, it was no longer a conspiracy theory that the federal government was involved in online censorship. The Elon Musk’s Twitter Files and Mark Zuckerberg’s public apology for caving to pressure from the FBI have corroborated digital dissidents’ accusations.

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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