There's some real things I want to appreciate & root into here, but as a geek growing up, one of my greatest & most persistence annoyances was how easy & happy it was for so many around me to pick being so ignorant, so blind, so insular.
Heck yes ignoring the world & big matters makes you happier. Heck yes keeping blinders on & seeing less is safer, more secure, simpler.
But fuck that. Fuck ignorance. Face things, see the scope of things. I hated the choice of ignorance then. Today I can at least accept that there's validity in multiple paths. But when we dock the people opting into the world for the real emption, empathy, & pain they experiemce for trying to see more? This is a modern mind-poison. There's so little to be said for being aware, for caring, by any measurable form. But we should. Boiling everything down to what is good for the individual is insufficient to maintain a society & this view will keep going on and on and on and it's so gross, so deeply deeply inadequate & shit.
Edit: there's a lot of very very sorry followups with people with really shitty social feeds & want-anxiety. Yes, that is some people's experience. But it hasnt been what I've seen. It hasnt been what people I know experince. Some of the greater hazards I've seen have been a kind of para-societal living-in-the-event that some people have, without any real stake, but I generally dont see anywhere near the level of Fear Uncertainty or Doubt the social-network-panic comments widely want to freak us out about. There is a knowing, real, & reasonable wokeness & solidarity, and so little of the negative pressures in my feeds that others tout, the people everywhere around me from so many decades & places are so much more nuanced & in tune & multifaceted in their view of the affairs & goings on than the media. This demonization of social media is a panic I simply dont see, anywhere. I think society has warped itself into an unjustified & unreasonable frenzie against something that is far less scary than we & especially the media make it out to be.
Social media isn't the world, or a big matter. One can still read/engage with the news without having to deal with as many dark patterns. We don't have a public digital square, but I'm not going to help Zuckerberg et al further privatize it at my own mental expense.
idk about that, a lot of news sources feel like they're optimizing for clicks too. where is some boring neutral news? then am i to broken to even stick with something like at this point lol maybe i need the clickbait
i agree with the main point, social media isnt the world. i think people forget that
In print form. That comes to your physical mailbox.
Newspapers are OK, but magazines are better, if you want "State of the world, processed and digested, after the fact, without the outrage of the moment leaking in."
I subscribe to... honestly more than I get around to reading fully, but part of it is to simply say, "Yes, I value this type of writing and information, please keep producing it."
There are some news sources that are less click baity and partisan, such as Axios, DW, or Reuters. If you can read French, courrier international is decent too.
Courrier International is totally worth the reading and its concept is pretty smart : most of their article are just translated articles from foreign ( = not France based) newspapers. It allows the reader to get a view of the current topics from the outside of the country. Furthermore, by its nature of being translated, this newspaper have to be "slow" and can’t fall under the "breaking news" clickbait temptation.
If anything I think my social media feeds/friends have far far more nuance & balance, accept the duality of existence & show it off, far far far more than the bland & polemic media/news.
Imo the social media panic is mostly people afraid of genuineness & earnesty, or people jist afraid of an idea they dont at all have any connection to or understanding of.
There is a very very real problem that this world lacks accessible role models. That we dont know who to look to, that we dont have local examples. That's not a social media problem: that's just ehat happens when the well-to-do parts of the economy stratify up & up & up & real living gets trashy cheap & hard. Some people fall for the shallow signs that are projected, on social media or in other cultural distribution mechanisms (music is a big longstanding distributor of cultue for example). But the lack of real meaning far far far outstripsy concern with social mediacs ability to let shallow symbols spread.
I think that in the context of social media it is less about ignoring the world & big matters but rather that you're getting a very biased view of the things that in the end is often useless and cause no tangible behavioral change in you.
The "fuck ignorance, face things" can be used to shove information down someone's throat that adds nothing to the person's life except maybe misery.
Being informed about stuff you can do nothing about that won't cause any tangible behavioral change (except maybe adding stress and anxiety) is not novel for the sake of it.
A rock that can't move, act or communicate that know the truth of the world, or Kardashians family dynamics, is no better than a rock that don't.
When someone develops a distorted picture of the world and becomes an activist based on it, that's just as bad for society as if they had never activated in the first place. In fact you could make a case that it's worse, mass shooters tend to be highly ideological and have views that are at odds with reality.
The problem we have with social media (and to a degree traditional media as well) is that both the nature of the technology and the profit incentives of the platforms encourage shallow thinking and cognitive bias among users. Going from paper to screens was bad enough in terms of its documented effects on focus and comprehension. Add to that shrinking the screen down to the size of our palms, enforcing 280 character limits, amplifying the most outrageous voices etc. and I sometimes wonder how civilization is still intact!
I agree that people should maintain some form of awareness of social issues and participation in them, democracy doesn't work without this. But an information diet heavy on social media will promote a distorted awareness of the world. And time spent on social media feels significant but it doesn't actually effect change. Things that do include: voting, attending a protest, writing to your congressman, volunteering your time and labor, earning extra income which you can donate to a cause, etc.
There are a lot of ways to get informed, participate & influence society, social media is one of the worst. It's the junk food of activism.
1) The writer, Cal Newport, gets his news from reading a broadsheet newspaper cover to cover every morning. (Not in the link but he's written about it elsewhere). I think it would be hard to argue that he's less well informed than someone scrolling through reddit, let alone FB or Instagram.
2) He's also said, and I agree, that pre-2006 or so Twitter and FB were pretty benign social media and have a lot of positives. Critically, this is before they developed infinite scrolling style timelines which are setup to maximise engagement. They were just chronological feeds of things posted by people you chose to follow.
3) Similarly to (2), the way those algorithms are optimised is not to deliberately expose you to the views of a wider range of people than you affirmatively chose to follow (although they could be!) but to maximise eyeball-time regardless. It turns out that the way to do that is to let highly emotionally charged and extreme views rise to the top.
As a result, the things you see will be either things you violently agree with from your bubble or things likely to trigger an immediate counter-response from what I think of as your anti-bubble. The anti-bubble looks like diverse views but are actually just fully defined as the inverse of the bubble's views. This deadens the space for mutual political engagement.
I think that "social media" could do lots of great things if it worked differently but I just don't think that empirically it does.
I’m all for engagement in news, world events and deliberate conversations.
Social media seems different in that increased feed engagement (read: revenue) for these companies can be to feed into insecurities. That’s not informational, that’s predatory.
I would say that interacting with the physical world/people is much richer and more fulfilling than social media (or any other media). Being aware of 'the world & big matters' does not make a person good or interesting. What really matters is not what media a person consumes (or does not consume), but what they do.
You can certainly hear about a lot of things on social media, but I don’t think reading a bunch of underinformed, overangry people fire memes, half-truths, and occasional outright lies back and forth constitutes facing anything in any meaningful way, nor will it make any difference in the world.
The issue is the knowledge of bad things you cant change and wont impact your behavior at all just makes you informed and miserable.
Being informed is not a universal good, more is not always better. Should have a personal cost/benefit calculation, “is it worth it to be this informed?” Etc.
I think the nuance here might be in keeping your head still in the general news of the world but avoiding the things that cause "tribal syndrome" or anything with "keeping up with the joneses".
if you decide to experience the entire world, all the time, there's no respite from the awful. the human mind just isn't capable of handling that well.
Heck yes ignoring the world & big matters makes you happier. Heck yes keeping blinders on & seeing less is safer, more secure, simpler.
But fuck that. Fuck ignorance. Face things, see the scope of things. I hated the choice of ignorance then. Today I can at least accept that there's validity in multiple paths. But when we dock the people opting into the world for the real emption, empathy, & pain they experiemce for trying to see more? This is a modern mind-poison. There's so little to be said for being aware, for caring, by any measurable form. But we should. Boiling everything down to what is good for the individual is insufficient to maintain a society & this view will keep going on and on and on and it's so gross, so deeply deeply inadequate & shit.
Edit: there's a lot of very very sorry followups with people with really shitty social feeds & want-anxiety. Yes, that is some people's experience. But it hasnt been what I've seen. It hasnt been what people I know experince. Some of the greater hazards I've seen have been a kind of para-societal living-in-the-event that some people have, without any real stake, but I generally dont see anywhere near the level of Fear Uncertainty or Doubt the social-network-panic comments widely want to freak us out about. There is a knowing, real, & reasonable wokeness & solidarity, and so little of the negative pressures in my feeds that others tout, the people everywhere around me from so many decades & places are so much more nuanced & in tune & multifaceted in their view of the affairs & goings on than the media. This demonization of social media is a panic I simply dont see, anywhere. I think society has warped itself into an unjustified & unreasonable frenzie against something that is far less scary than we & especially the media make it out to be.