Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
Ratings40
Average rating3.7
An interesting take about social networks (especially Facebook, Twitter & Google) and reasons to remove them from our lives. While most of the advices are really good, I found this book quite hard to read due to its prose. Still it gives a lot of brainfood on the toll social medias take on our societies and mental health & lives.
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Thought-provoking and worth the read. I subtracted one star solely because of the unnecessary profanity within; it would have otherwise been a 4-star rating.
I think this should be a must-read for everyone using social media. You may not be ready to quit, like me, but it's better to know what social media is doing to you if you're going to use it!
Scientist Jaron Lanier offers ten reasons for deleting our social media accounts now.
1. You are losing your free will.
2. Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times.
3. Social media is making you into an a-hole.
4. Social media is undermining truth.
5. Social media is making what you say meaningless.
6. Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy.
7. Social media is making you unhappy.
8. Social media doesn't want you to have economic dignity.
9. Social media is making politics impossible.
10. Social media hates your soul.
It seems pretty clear that social media is toxic. Is the toxicity terminal for individuals? For our society?
I don't usually review books, but the number of negative reviews of this book forces my hand. Perhaps it could be written in a different fashion, and the author truly lacks writing capacity. I don't buy into that. The book can be finished in 2 or 3 hours, without skimming it as has been suggested.
My first contact with Lanier was “You're Not A Gadget”, suggested to us in college. A few years later I would be gifted ”Who Owns The Future”, and, if anything, his writing has gotten better. It's conversational, simple, to the point. To dismiss his arguments on the basis of whether he can deliver research paper-level writing is folly.
Occasionally a book deserves a rating that isn't strictly tied to how it is written, but must get an extra star simply for relevance to society. I do the same with movies, punitively distributing or withdrawing a full star from a movie that is either important or more of the same. Like it matters. Sometimes the experience or knowledge of something trumps other more objective criteria.
And so, “Ten Arguments...” gets 5. It's important, almost mandatory reading. I left my last social network in 2013, prompted by “You're Not A Gadget”. Ever since, when I try to join another mass behavior modification network — such as Twitter, last year —, I'm filled with anxiety. You might be too.
The current business model of social media is designed to compound on the worst aspects of our communal behavior. It's destroying your soul. It's making you into an asshole. Etc., etc. You get the point.
As one of the techies, like Lanier, I confirm we're crying for the help of the masses to change a system constructed to destroy what's best in us. I build this stuff, and feel as if “Ten Arguments...” could be the rallying cry for change. If you know of a better book on the subject matter, read that one.
But read this book, too. Read it now.