what is Social Media doing to us?

We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood.

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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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.

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.

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.