what is Social Media doing to us?

We turn into each other’s audience, judging from afar. We become each other’s data harvesters, knowing who went where, at when and with whom. We even become each other’s digital oppressors: we form a limited perception of who we think someone is based on what they post, and when they do something that doesn’t conform to the imposed image of them,... 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.

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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The rise of botlike behavior over the past decade has led to the creation of a meme: the NPC, or Non-Player Character. Originally a term to describe video game characters whose behavior is completely computer-controlled, it now also refers to real world humans who behave as predictably as video game NPCs, giving scripted responses and engaging in... See more

The metrics don’t excite me. I don’t want ‘followers’ — which I often associate with ‘lurkers’. I much prefer readers, connections and engaged subscribers to my work. I know people with 1 million+ Instagram followers and I believe them when they tell me it doesn’t feel as good as you’d think. It’s a very shallow interaction, it doesn’t do much for... See more