what is Social Media doing to us?

But an unbounded information landscape is not an unalloyed good. Because social media does not favor accuracy or balance or diversity. It favors clicks. The more engaging and enraging the content, the more clicks it receives.

Today, everything is about speed and real time. We are no longer concerned with real space.

You’re distracted by your potential distribution.

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.

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.