You can be addicted to things you supposedly hate, including social media

Most of my thoughts on social media can be found here :
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/MdXV8W38bFM

I agree with Lanier's view that a particular business model of social media is to blame. G+ doesn't have the same sort of drown-you-with-recommendations and adverts system, and that's a darn good thing.

The problem, for Lanier, is not technology, per se. The problem is the business model based on the manipulation of individual behaviour. Social-media platforms know what you’re seeing, and they know how you acted in the immediate aftermath of seeing it, and they can decide what you will see next in order to further determine how you act—a feedback loop that gets progressively tighter until it becomes a binding force on an individual’s free will.... Negative emotions like outrage and contempt and anxiety tend to drive significantly more engagement than positive ones. This toxic miasma of bad vibes—of masochistic pleasures—is not, in Lanier’s view, an epiphenomenon of social media, but rather the fuel on which it has been engineered to run.

He goes so far as to suggest that even Drumpf would be a “nicer, better person” if Twitter suddenly ceased to exist. “As a lefty,” he writes, “I don’t think a BUMMER [Behaviours of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent]-style lefty leader would be any better than Drumpf. Debasement is debasement, whatever direction it comes from.” I would, I suppose, prefer a lefty leader who didn’t tweet from a West Wing en suite at 5 a.m. to a lefty leader who did, but I would take either over a right-wing President who pursues tax cuts for the super-rich, dismantles environmental regulations, and implements border-protection policies specifically designed to victimize immigrants and their children. Stephen Miller does not appear to tweet much; it’s hard to imagine him being a worse person if he did.

Well, here I would add that the social media is neither necessary nor necessarily sufficient for this kind of behaviour - it's just one contributing factor. I thought Lanier's comment that being addicted to the negative effects of social media could make someone worse was very interesting, but it's hardly going to be the only social influence in (almost) anyone's life. For most people it's going to be just one stream of information among many, so the degree of influence it has will vary strongly. And of course you can be an awful person anyway, that should go without saying.

Which is why I'd doubt I'd agree with this Bridle chap that social media is bringing up some kind of apocalypse, because I for one like discussing stuff with people I like. That's all it needs to be. The stuff about global warming making it impossible to think is just so much hot air (hah hah hah). Nevertheless :

Here’s how Bridle puts it : "We find ourselves today connected to vast repositories of knowledge and yet we have not learned to think. In fact, the opposite is true: that which was intended to enlighten the world in practice darkens it. The abundance of information and the plurality of worldviews now accessible to us through the internet are not producing a coherent consensus reality, but one riven by fundamentalist insistence on simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. It is on this contradiction that the idea of a new dark age turns: an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity, and in which we look about ourselves in search of new ways to understand the world."

A lot of knowledge is a dangerous thing. But are people really connected to vast repositories of knowledge or just cat pictures ? If you want to change people, are you better off trying to giving them more and more facts, teaching them new methodologies, or a combination of both ? I don't think we really know the answer to this.

The internet is not the "cause of all of our deepest problems". It is an enabler of communication on an unprecedented scale, but like all media it isn't good or bad in itself. It depends entirely on how it's used. The relevant factors are that it is cheap and instantaneously reproducible, which is difficult to replicate with other media. This gives it unique characteristics, but were it properly utilised there would be no need to see it as inherently dangerous. That's where all those societal network models come in. I would concede that it is "both the manifestation and cause" but I certainly wouldn't label it as the root cause of anything.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-deliberate-awfulness-of-social-media