what is Social Media doing to us?

From Bill Gates’ conversation with Trevor Noah on the What now? podcast, reflecting on social media and the Internet:

Our industry was very young and just incredibly fast moving, but it didn't have this, oh, this will be a tool for Holocaust denial or weird impacts. And the idea that it would directly be used for political influence, one country

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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

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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truer words have never been spoken https://t.co/g5AKAG9RPF

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

The media has propagated a new definition of what it means to be a good consumer of information. They want you to read high-velocity content from multiple information streams and be constantly plugged into what’s happening. They can sell the most advertisements this way.