My assessment is that you are either unusually resistant to the manipulative tactics of social media or you haven’t kept track of your usage accurately enough to write an honest self-assessment. I’d lean towards the former since you spend a lot of time on games that don’t have much of the manipulative “gamification” aspects that makes social media so powerful.
But even if you aren’t personally affected very much by social media manipulation, I would argue you should still be concerened. The world in which you live is increasingly shaped by content aggregation algorithms on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Ninety percent of journalists have a twitter account, and news is increasingly shaped by the interaction of journalists with each other and readers on social media. The combination of irrational groupthink on Twitter and the bad incentives of the traditional advertising model have had huge impacts on the quality of coverage and the topics of coverage. Journalists even realize this. Here’s Vox Co-Founder Ezra Klein explaining why he moved to San Francisco:
Part of the reason I moved from DC to Oakland is it no longer felt like I could understand what the hell was happening to politics if I didn’t get a better handle on tech.
So many of today’s politics stories are actually stories about how technology is changing politics.
I don’t think Trump, Sanders, or AOC would’ve had the rises they’ve had without Twitter. I don’t think old theories of how parties work, the role money plays, or how the media makes coverage decisions, hold now that political communication is social, algorithmic, and viral.
And it’s not just politics. Life is just what we pay attention to. And what we pay attention to, increasingly, are screens.
There’s really no escaping the effects of social media. Its effects are so pervasive that even if you don’t use it your world view is shaped by it.
My assessment is that you are either unusually resistant to the manipulative tactics of social media or you haven’t kept track of your usage accurately enough to write an honest self-assessment. I’d lean towards the former since you spend a lot of time on games that don’t have much of the manipulative “gamification” aspects that makes social media so powerful.
But even if you aren’t personally affected very much by social media manipulation, I would argue you should still be concerened. The world in which you live is increasingly shaped by content aggregation algorithms on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Ninety percent of journalists have a twitter account, and news is increasingly shaped by the interaction of journalists with each other and readers on social media. The combination of irrational groupthink on Twitter and the bad incentives of the traditional advertising model have had huge impacts on the quality of coverage and the topics of coverage. Journalists even realize this. Here’s Vox Co-Founder Ezra Klein explaining why he moved to San Francisco:
There’s really no escaping the effects of social media. Its effects are so pervasive that even if you don’t use it your world view is shaped by it.