what is Social Media doing to us?

Another study found that college students in 2010 were 40 percent less empathetic than students from 30 years earlier. A big contributor to this is undoubtedly the rise of technology and social media, which encourages fleeting superficial connection, not empathy.

In another study, researchers put multiple pairs of strangers in a room together and

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Stand for something that’s all your own. Help us find unexpected things and think unexpected thoughts. Don’t create for the algorithm (as tempting as it is to try and give it what it seems to want, to help your brand gain visibility). Don’t drift to the middle in search of eyeballs. Think bigger, more long-term, more societal-level, even. Do things... See more

“As humans we are involved in a dance with things that cannot be stopped, since we are only human through things,” says Hodder. We will continue to perform lifestyles made possible by the Internet whether individual social media platforms survive or not, and even, especially, if we log off for good. Social media altered the world in the same way... See more

Knowing you live in a magpie culture is worth keeping in mind. If, as Isaiah Berlin once said, “foxes” are people who know many little things, and “hedgehogs” people who know one big thing, then the more recent “magpie” is someone who knows nothing yet manages to maintain a beautiful nest of ideas that aren’t theirs.

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