Banning TikTok
I'm not sure if I support banning TikTok. I do, however, very much encourage everyone to voluntarily stop using it.
I'm not sure if I support banning TikTok. I do, however, very much encourage everyone to voluntarily stop using it.
I genuinely worry about people who use TikTok heavily.
“Somehow, we survived as a culture for centuries without exposing ourselves to thousands of profit-driven manipulations dumped on our living room carpet all day, every day.”
—Seth Godin in Shields up
#Belief #Business #Communication #Philosophy #Politics #SocialMedia #Technology
“Don't make the mistake of thinking you're Facebook's customer. You're not. You're the product. Its customers are the advertisers.”
—Bruce Schneier
“The advertising man is the enfant terrible of the time, unabashed before the eternities. He does not conceal his awareness of the fact that he is the cornerstone of the most respectable American institutions; the newspapers and magazines depend on him; Literature and Journalism are his hand maidens. Even war needs him.”
—S. N. Behrman in The New Republic, 1919
Do social media advertisers realize they have the same power today, by funding the new engines of literature, journalism, and war?
#Belief #Business #Communication #Politics #SocialMedia #Technology
“As anyone who has actually gone outside to touch grass will attest, what you see in social media is typically so exaggerated and distorted that it may as well be entirely fictional.”
—Viktor in Are you okay?
Don't let anyone make you a jerk, no matter how pure their intentions.
#Communication #Philosophy #Politics #SocialMedia #Technology
I've been listening to The Attention Merchants, my first foray into the world of audiobooks, having begrudgingly ceded more freedom to DRM. I was struck by this passage, discussing the disillusionment of Walter Lippmann, a journalist and media critic:
“Any communication, Lippmann came to see, is potentially propagandistic, in the sense of propagating a view. For it presents one set of facts, or one perspective, fostering or weakening some 'stereotype' held by the mind. It is fair to say, then, that any and all information that one consumes—pays attention to—will have some influence, even if just forcing a reaction.”
—Tim Wu in The Attention Merchants
It's easy to notice this happening today. So many memes, videos, and tweets advance ludicrously simplistic perspectives. Fake news spreads 6 times more quickly than true news. Whether we agree or disagree with the content we see, we react, and antisocial media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok monetize those reactions.
If Lippmann is correct that “any and all information that one consumes… forces a reaction,” and if the information we consume today is vast, simplistic, and even wrong, then perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by the extreme reactions we witness.
#Belief #Communication #Philosophy #Politics #SocialMedia #Technology
Text-based conversation is inherently hazardous. I’ve known too many people who can be jerks in writing, despite being pleasant in person, to believe otherwise. I myself have done the same too many times to believe otherwise. We didn’t evolve to talk this way to the extent we do. Facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language are so important, as is the compassion that shared space instills.
Of course, none of this excuses (anti)social media, which is even more terrible for so many reasons, like a house of horrors built along a fault line.
#Communication #Philosophy #Politics #SocialMedia #Technology
I tweeted the following on April 2nd, 2019, about one month before deleting my account:
Our technology is evolving faster than we are. We have built ourselves a twenty-first century library when we possess stone-age critical thinking skills. What did we think was going to happen?
I later learned that Dr. E.O. Wilson once made a similar point, in a statement often quoted by the Center for Humane Technology:
The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.
His version may be better than mine. I'm just glad I'm not alone.