what is Social Media doing to us?

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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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 algorithms identify our politics and then shepherd us into a hermetically sealed bubble, framing our worldview through a window of rage and extremism.

For many of us, the pandemic didn’t create new factors that ruined our attention – it supercharged the factors that had already been corroding our attention for years. I saw this when I talked with my godson Adam, who I had taken to Memphis. His attention, which had been deteriorating for some time, was now shattered. He was on his phone almost

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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.

Even the guy who invented the infinite scroll later regretted it. These interfaces are not designed to help you—swiping and scrolling are rarely the best ways to do anything. They aren’t designed to solve your problem, but actually aim to prevent closure, and create an illusion that there are still infinite choices available to you.