I’ve allowed social media to make me change my personality and my civility too much. I dislike what it has done to society in general but am more appalled that I allowed it to take too much root into me. I’m backing off. This isn’t someone else causing an issue, this isn’t some other asshole suppressing my free thought or oppressing me and making me a victim.
THis is me, this is on me and my responsibility to make me a better person and not blame someone else.
There. Done…I wish and expect to be a better person for it.
I listened to an interesting podcast recently with Ezra Klein interviewing Jaron Lanier, one of the people involved in early development of virtual reality technology and a critic of the for-advertising model of application development and social media. I don’t normally recommend podcasts to people unless I find them particularly insightful, but this one is well worth a listen because Klein and Lanier managed to cut to the heart of everything that is very deliberately wrong with the Silicon Valley culture and the way social media is promoted and misused.
Other than sharing vacation photos with a select collection of friends I’ve almost completely avoided social media and the addictive properties it has been intentionally developed to cultivate. I’d like to claim this was a deliberate choice, and to some degree I felt early social media like MySpace and Facebook had its place for promotional value but encouraged a kind of social oversharing I’ve never been comfortable with, but until listening to the podcast linked above I wasn’t fully aware of exactly how the popular social media platforms have been designed deliberately using behaviorial and affective neuroscience to appeal to basic aggression, lust, fear, and seeking mechanisms of the cerebellum below the logical processing and reasoning of the prefrontal cortex.
Everybody should self-monitor their behavior and potential for compulsion toward social media and take action appropriate to assuring that it isn’t causing a problem. I don’t think legislative or regulatory solutions in general are desireable, although making sure that people and organizations using social media to spread ideas or foster movements are accurately representing themselves is certainly worthy of consideration and discussion.
Sigene, it’s easy to become a master of snark online. There are times when it happens even to the best of them (I say them, not us). The fact that you’re horrified by what you see yourself as becoming is a good sign.
Hang in there. You’ll be you again soon, and more you than you thought you could be.