…the best way to protect yourself is to maintain a robust distinction between your inner self and your presence online. Remember that at its best, social media is a tool. You ought not let it define you or let it creep into your self-concept. It is inherently dehumanizing, and if you let it in too deep, you will end up dehumanizing yourself.
Truly take a moment to think about it: How do you want to occupy space online? What are your goals? It’s nice when people treat their social media accounts as extensions of themselves, rather than as ads for themselves. The internet should not be a space to spam innocent bystanders with Soundcloud links and promotional blurbs. Instead, it should be a space to really exist inside of, and a place where you can forge connections that organically grow into mutual interest in—and support for—each other. Online friends are just different than your IRL friends. So, do not drop your friends or completely abandon your “old life” when you get a few hundred or thousand followers online.
The system, then, does not particularly care for the individual user as much as it thrives on the decomposition and recomposition of the data that users provide Being shown what you are “supposed” to see is central to what social media offer (the promise of self-expression is mainly an alibi for that larger surrender to algorithmic recommendation); they allow us to consume that passivity toward what we want as pleasurable in itself.
Experiencing your feed without numbers is such a fundamentally different thing. You evaluate every bit of content, not in the context of external approval (how many Likes or the numerical influence of the creator), but simply in the act of its consumption. but for all organic usage, let's make it a numbers-free space. Compensation (stock or cash) based on increased usage and engagement targets has to be somehow changed. I'm not sure what that exactly looks like, but I am certain that as long as this isn't fixed, even with the implementation of the first four planks, we’re still going to be facing the same challenges
many people now rely on their employer to pay the premium for insurance against the erosion of their social life. Hardly a cause for either company’s success, but certainly a tailwind. Ironically this would mean that WeWork didn’t stand on the shoulders of Facebook as a user acquisition machine so much as it cleaned up what Facebook left in its wake as an alienation machine.
AirPods foster a different approach to detachment: Rather than mute the surrounding world altogether, they visually signal the wearer’s choice to perpetually relegate the immediate environment to the background. AirPods, then, express a more complete embrace of our simultaneous existence in physical and digital space, taking for granted that we’re frequently splitting our mental energy between the two. AirPods have externalities — penalizing non-wearers while confining the value they generate to their individual users. Once everyone has earbuds that are always in, physical proximity will no longer confer a social expectation of shared experience. subordinate our in-person sociality to the privatized infrastructure of networked communication Now, the kind of space that suffices instead is a pleasant backdrop for solitary device usage, a relatively blank slate that doesn’t compete with the phone’s foreground — conditions that places like Sweetgreen and Equinox supply. A dominant aural information platform could have a similar effect, fostering a world where we might as well leave our headphones on because there’s nothing around us worth hearing.
Online writing is too didactic. Would like to recapture the feeling that not everything I read has to explicitly deliver information - feels like that's more frequently the case with stuff I've found offline
Online writing is too didactic. Would like to recapture the feeling that not everything I read has to explicitly deliver information - feels like that's more frequently the case with stuff I've found offline My hunch is that digital writing evolves to be more responsive to measurable engagement, so there's an ever-present incentive to optimize what's written for utility (why internet content also gravitates toward self-helpyness)
Even as we dream of abandoning social media, we search for ways to redeem it. and it’s that quest for large-scale value extraction, they argue, that leads directly to the crises of compromised privacy and engineered addictiveness with which we’re currently grappling. Jaron Lanier has called “multiple-choice identities.” According to this way of thinking, sites like Facebook and Instagram encourage conformism because it makes your data easier to process and monetize. This creates the exhausting sense that you’re a worker in a data factory rather than a three-dimensional individual trying to express yourself and connect with other real people in an organic way online. free-form energy reminiscent of the Internet’s early days. a human-scale environment The Internet may work better when it’s spread out, as originally designed. For the exhausted majority of social-media users, however, the appeal of the proverbial quiet bench might outweigh the lure of a better Facebook.
It was always obvious that trying to see without being seen — to know without being known — was a dead end. Through a screen, personal information is cheap, and unseen seeing is the default. My finger hovers over the icon before I decide that saying “awww,” to myself, alone in my office, seems least likely to cause any unanticipated harm. traded in a problematic status as unpaid content creators for another troublesome status as ambivalent consumers.
i’ve been thinking about buttondown’s future a lot lately, trying to work out how to turn it from “growing and largely unmapped” into “sustainable and legible”. 1 i’ve been rereading seeing like a state, so legible might not be the best choice of words here, but i digress ↩
instead what seemed required was a kind of ironic disavowal of disavowal with regard to our online presentation: The tone foregrounds the idea that we all must put on an act that fools no one. Among the historical antecedents, They reinforce the idea that people should always be working by providing another arena for invidious comparison, self-branding, and optimization. But something more subtle may be happening as well. Social media platforms, like all technologies that mediate the self, “heighten consciousness,” in media scholar Walter Ong’s words. But if earlier technological developments, like writing, heightened consciousness to extend the self, newer technologies may heighten it to a point where it no longer sustains the self but undermines it. writing — the “technologizing of the word,” as Ong described it — distanced us from the flux of immediate experience and expanded consciousness into space and across time. The diary could be considered paradigmatic: It makes subjectivity an object of reflection, both in the moment of composition and for future readers as well. is to see at least some aspect of yourself suspended in time and space. The audience’s resulting dispersal through space and time leads to a sporadic and unpredictable set of interactions, which can anchor habits of continual checking or an intensified susceptibility to push notifications (part of how platforms try to elicit compulsive engagement). The result is that we can’t help but be aware of ourselves through these platforms as continual performers, moment by moment. What kind of self derives from this condition? Imagine a wedding photographer who circulates, trying to capture candid images of spontaneous or unscripted moments. “Act naturally,” they might joke, before encouraging everyone to “pretend I’m not here,” ironically vocalizing the impossible possibility to diffuse some of the pressure of doing as they say. Now imagine that you are that photographer, but that it is also your wedding. And imagine also that the wedding never ends. To borrow sociologist Erving Goffman’s terminology, broadcasting on social media amounts to a substantial expansion of what he called our “front stage,” where we are consciously and continually involved in the work of impression management But they have really mastered the art of transforming the backstage into another front stage. We can understand backstage experience, then, as a respite not only from the gaze of an audience but also the gaze we must fix on ourselves to pull off our performances. The algorithms that ostensibly reveal what your “true” or “authentic” self would choose for itself feed off the very exhaustion that the platforms generate, offering refuge from the burden of identity work in the automation of the will. Life needs the protection of nonawareness.
“in conclusion, we need a social media platform that lets you sit next to someone on a bench in the park & feed some goddamn birds”
in conclusion, we need a social media platform that lets you sit next to someone on a bench in the park & feed some goddamn birds— Max Kreminski (@maxkreminski) August 18, 2018
“The assumed consensus becomes its own reality - a position others can respond to. It doesn't actually need to accurately describe what's happening, the narrative can just live its entire life in the medium where it was created”
“@vgr The assumed consensus becomes its own reality - a position others can respond to. It doesn't actually need to accurately describe what's happening, the narrative can just live its entire life in the medium where it was created”
“Thanks for reading! Hopefully with your help we'll be wishing the Web a happy 60th birthday in another thirty years.”
Thanks for reading! Hopefully with your help we'll be wishing the Web a happy 60th birthday in another thirty years. 😍🌐— John F🎃minella 🌠 (@jxxf) March 12, 2019
“it makes more sense to me to analyze social media platforms in terms of ‘social capital’ than things like ‘dopamine hits,’ but they often end up being treated as the same thing”
“it makes more sense to me to analyze social media platforms in terms of "social capital" than things like "dopamine hits," but they often end up being treated as the same thing https://t.co/ryHo7OGAGr”
Using my phone and computer might feel like nothing more than the static of passing time, but all the micro-decisions I make as I search and swipe and scroll are secretly valuable commodities. Every time I touch a device, I leave a trail of digital DNA that can be used to reverse-engineer some version of me that is used to sell me things. There is a context for each of these. But there is no one explanatory key to unlock the cryptic, boring mess of the whole. For everything that lives on my computer and phone, the only common denominator, really, is me. Something I’ve noticed in my Instagram feed lately: the influencers seem exhausted. It’s not like leveraging authenticity is a new thing, but what strikes me about this version of the trend is how much explanation the smallest acts of self-conscious unraveling involve. The caption-to-photo ratio is off the charts. It takes a whole essay to comfortably give up some of the rough work it takes to be a person. The kinds of digital particulates and residues that turn up in our devices aren’t the things we might normally stake our identities on, but the fact of their being recorded imbues them with new meaning. I read the minor riot of imperfections in my Instagram feed as a heartfelt backlash against the toll it takes to both produce and consume mediated lives. More cynically, I might call it a race to vulnerability in the new competitive landscape of monetized self-exposure. Either way, I get where the impulse comes from — I indulged it only a few paragraphs ago. It’s not like I’m really showing you all the curiously boring stuff that’s in my phone; I’m only telling you about it. And I’m making sure you know that I know how boring it is, before you reach your own judgments. Despite my better knowledge, my devices still feel like private spaces.
“However, I think this is more a case of accommodation rather than intended design. Group chat is simply a series of free pipes distributed via an app for you to send images and text through. ‘You’ as a group get to decide what is ok, normal, and expected to be shared. Rarely is it ever an explicit ‘decision’.”
excited to say i wrote a book about photography and social media! it's out with @VersoBooks in April and you can pre-order it now if you'd like: https://t.co/lD43PwRjJa pic.twitter.com/bmOt0U7R5W— nathanjurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) February 4, 2019
Just remember: most people want to meet you as much as you want to meet them, especially in social situations like this. No one would prefer to stand there and stare at their phone when there are tons of fascinating people around.
in conclusion: I'm more myself on the internet than I am in "real life". maybe you are too. maybe that's fine— Max Kreminski (@maxkreminski) January 10, 2019
“The analogy I'm thinking of here is a group of people sitting working at their computers. Every so often, you look up and look around you, sometimes to rest your eyes, and other times to check people are still there. Sometimes you catch an eye, sometimes not. Sometimes it triggers a conversation. But it bonds you into a group experience, without speaking.”
