what is Social Media doing to us?

We live in a time when more interesting ideas, concepts, people, and places can fly by in the space of one 30 minute TikTok binge than our ancestors experienced in the entirety of their localized illiterate lives.

Social media gives us addictive routine; constantly checking our phones, mindlessly scrolling, endlessly searching for new stimulation. In this way, it keeps us trapped in profane time. Endless cycles without much substance, a timelessness that isn’t full, but empty. Look up from a social media feed and you may have lost half an hour, but that half... See more

The Opinion Pageant:

The rise of social media as the primary mode of interaction has caused us to overvalue opinions as a gauge of character. We are now defined more by what we say than what we actually do, and words, unlike deeds, are cheap and easy to counterfeit.

Once upon a time, the Internet was predicated on user-generated content. The hope was that ordinary people would take advantage of the Web’s low barrier for publishing to post great things, motivated simply by the joy of open communication. But then ad sales came into play.

That business model is still what most of the Internet relies on today.... 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.

We know that what we post and consume on social media feels increasingly empty, and yet we are powerless to stop it. Perhaps if we had better language for the problem, it would be easier to solve. “Content begets content,” Eichhorn writes.