recently read: ten arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now
recently read: ten arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now
04: “How can you be authentic when everything you read, say, or do is being fed into a judgment machine?”
Knowing what book someone is reading and what parts they resonate with most can be so intimate. It reveals their interests, where their head is at, and what excerpts are so significant that they will mark up a page because they think it’s worth revisiting at a later time. Personally, I’m fascinated by what books others gravitate towards and I find that it helps me get to know them better and gives me a small glimpse into who they are at their core. No one asked for these book reviews, but maybe it’s my way of showing who I am and what I’m interested in – beyond the clothes, the products, and my career. Or at the very least, encourage some to look up from their phones and instead towards the pages of a good book.
Book no. 21 of 2022
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier
I wanted to like this more than I did. While I’m glad I read it, I didn’t love it and I’m not sure that I would recommend it wholeheartedly. Don’t get me wrong – it has some very good excerpts and there were many things I needed to learn from it, but I think the writing style was not for me – a bit hard to follow and too doom and gloom. I do think the dangers and concerns of social media should be more widely talked about and I am interested in finding more books that cover that in a more digestible way. Below, I’m sharing some of my favorite excerpts and other readings I’d recommend that are in line with this topic.
On who you are on social media
“You know the adage that you should choose a partner on the basis of who you become when you’re around the person? That’s a good way to choose technologies, too.”
“If, when you participate in online platforms, you notice a nasty thing inside yourself, an insecurity, a sense of low self-esteem, a yearning to lash out, to swat someone down, then leave that platform.”
“Look into yourself… are you being as kind as you want to be? At what times are you more like the person you want to be, and when do you get irritable or dismissive?”
“What if listening to an inner voice or heeding a passion for ethics or beauty were to lead to more important work in the long term, even if it measured as less successful in the moment? What if deeply reaching a small number of people matters more than reaching everybody with nothing?”
“How can you be authentic when everything you read, say, or do is being fed into a judgment machine?”
On living in different realities
“...algorithms determine what you see. That means you don’t know what other people are seeing… You can’t know how much the worldviews of other people are being biased and shaped…”
“But when we’re all seeing different, private worlds, then our cues to one another become meaningless. Our perception of actual reality… suffers.”
“We see less than ever before of what others are seeing, so we have less opportunity to understand each other.”
“Your understanding of others has been disrupted because you don’t know what they’ve experienced in their feeds, while the reverse is also true; the empathy others might offer you is challenged because you can’t know the context in which you’ll be understood.”
On awareness
“No one can be perfect. We can’t live in a way that perfectly moves the world as we wish it to move in every detail. We sometimes eat the wrong things; we don’t make all the choices we could to reduce our carbon footprint, or all the choices that would support people who are at the wrong end of the injustices of our world. But awareness does contribute to gradual change. The more people are aware, the easier it is for each individual to change, a little at a time.”
While I may not have loved this book, there was a lot I needed to be reminded of. I used to be the type to clap back on any little comment on social media. I thought I needed to put people in their place and after a while, I realized how much energy it drained from me and how I didn’t actually like the person I became when I interacted like that. I learned how to use the block button on people trying to get a rise out of me. I learned how to use the mute button on people who I found brought out an insecurity or self-consciousness in me. Because of that, I’ve felt a lot better on social media. While the author is urging readers to delete it entirely, I’ve found ways to limit myself on it which has made all the difference, which I talk more about here.
His writing about the different realities on social media also hit home. I talked about this a lot on How to be a Woman on the Internet, but I had to learn that the hard way. I saw how social media affected my relationships negatively – with friends and even my mom. I made judgments about them based on what they shared – or didn’t share. And they made judgments about me. In my piece about connection on social media, it says:
But it’s important to remember, we don’t just lack the context of people’s social media feeds – we also usually lack the context of their whole life. People are layered, and in real life it’s easier to see and try to understand those layers, even if you don’t necessarily agree. It’s one of the reasons that offline disagreements are so much more productive than online ones, and why – after much trial and error – I’m working on engaging in conflict on the internet less.
Whether or not you choose to read this book, I do recommend you read the following, which all touch on similar topics:
As always, thanks for reading.