{"id":30664,"date":"2019-11-30T15:38:13","date_gmt":"2019-11-30T23:38:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pocketwisdominsights.com\/pwicolab\/?p=30664"},"modified":"2020-03-30T16:37:42","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T23:37:42","slug":"social-media-a-modern-blight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pocketwisdominsights.com\/pwicolab\/technology\/technology-co-lab\/technology-co-lab-blogs\/third-party\/social-media-a-modern-blight\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Media \u2013 A Modern Blight"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Opening Insights: Danger of Unclear Thinking<\/h2>\n

The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before.
It's not that there's something new in our way of thinking - it's that
credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.<\/em>
CARL SAGAN<\/p>\n

Carl Sagan may not have been thinking about social media when he made the above statement, but it accurately describes how the irresponsible use of social media has come to untangle the social fabric of a once-great nation. <\/p>\n

When wisdom spoke we didn't listen and now we speak without thinking. <\/p>\n

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Twitter is a great place to tell the world what you're thinking before you've had a chance to think about it. <\/p>\n

Chris Pirillo <\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There's no doubt that social media keeps people connected and allows them to share their thoughts almost instantly, but think about how it has changed the landscape of thoughtful information exchange. In times before, when we just needed to vent, to let loose the emotional knot in our stomach or calm the swirling storm in our heads we'd call a trusted friend or family member. <\/p>\n

This type of call was meant to be nonsensical; an expulsion of emotion and feelings. It was necessary to let it all out. Afterward, clear thinking was again possible. Nowadays, we use social media as our trusted friend<\/em>, and what used to be private conversation between individuals that understand each other has now become a curated and perpetually preserved self-characterization that will be judged, misunderstood, taken out of context and used to hurt you.<\/p>\n

Maybe, instead of better social media, we just need more real friends.<\/p>\n

Informational Insights: Power of Manipulation<\/h2>\n

The following article was published by PJ Media, \"a reliable source for original, unique, and cutting-edge political news and analysis.\" It was written by John Hawkins, a columnist for PJ Media covering politics and the US.<\/p>\n

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Once you get beyond the government, the greatest threats to free speech and free thought in America are the social media companies that have been allowed to become monopolies. If there is such a thing as a public square in the modern world, these companies increasingly control it and decide who gets heard, who doesn\u2019t, and what ideas the public is ALLOWED to see. This is much more dangerous to our republic than most people realize. You'll get a better idea of why that is as you read these quotes.<\/p>\n

1. \u201cA handful of people, working at a handful of technology companies, through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today. I don\u2019t know a more urgent problem than this. It\u2019s changing our democracy, and it\u2019s changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships that we want with each other.\u201d \u2013 Former Google employee Tristan Harris<\/a><\/p>\n

2. \u201cRandomized, controlled experiments conducted with more than 10,000 people from 39 countries suggest that one company alone \u2014 Google LLC, which controls about 90 percent of online search in most countries \u2014 has likely been determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the national elections in the world for several years now, with increasing impact each year as Internet penetration has grown.\u201d \u2013 Robert Epstein<\/a><\/p>\n

3. \"The YouTube algorithm that I helped build in 2011 still recommends the flat earth theory by the *hundreds of millions.* This investigation by @RawStory shows some of the real-life consequences of this badly designed AI.... So basically we have the two best AIs of the world, on Instagram and YouTube, competing to convince people that the earth is flat. Because it yields large amounts of watch time, and watch time yields ads. This is a #raceToTheBottom....Flat Earth is not a \u2018small bug.\u2019 It reveals that there is a structural problem in Google's and Facebook's AIs: they exploit weaknesses of the most vulnerable people, to make them believe the darnedest things.\" -- Former YouTube and Google employee Guillaume Chaslot<\/a><\/p>\n

4. \u201cThe dynamics of the attention economy are structurally set up to undermine the human will. If politics is an expression of our human will, on individual and collective levels, then the attention economy is directly undermining the assumptions that democracy rests on. If Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat are gradually chipping away at our ability to control our own minds, could there come a point, I ask, at which democracy no longer functions?\u201d \u2013 Former Google strategist James Williams<\/a><\/p>\n

5. \"Social networking sites might tap into the basic brain systems for delivering pleasurable experience. However, these experiences are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st-century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity.\" \u2013 Oxford professor Susan Greenfield<\/a><\/p>\n

6. \u201cTwice as many teenagers now have depression as a generation ago. This high rate of depression has no biological explanation. Instead, it appears to be caused by engagement with social media on smartphones. It\u2019s now clear that there\u2019s a strong association between use of social media and depression in adolescents. The more depressed adolescents are, the more they use social media; the more they use social media, the more depressed they are. Which causes which is unclear, but whatever the cause, it\u2019s a vicious cycle.\u201d -- Dr. Nassir Ghaemi<\/a><\/p>\n

7. \"Just before July fourth, for example, Facebook automatically blocked a post from a Texas newspaper that it claimed contained hate speech. Facebook then asked the paper to 'review the contents of its page and remove anything that does not comply with Facebook\u2019s policies.' The text at issue was the Declaration of Independence.\" -- Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.)<\/a><\/p>\n

8. \u201cCore assumption in tech: personalized ads are better for users. Ads exploit your insecurities to manipulate you into buying stuff you don't need. Who wants their personal insecurities amplified?\" \u2013 Former Google employee James Damore<\/a><\/p>\n

9. \"Shallow emotions. An incapacity to feel genuine love. A need for stimulation. Frequent verbal outbursts. Poor behavioral controls. These are just some of the things that social media are encouraging in all of us. They're also a pretty comprehensive diagnostic checklist for sociopathy \u2014 in fact, that's where I got the list.\" -- Milo Yiannopoulos<\/a><\/p>\n

10. \u201cCosmetic surgery procedures have increased 137 percent since 2000, according to a report by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, with young people contributing to the rise significantly. In what scientists have called \u2018Snapchat dysmorphia,\u2019 young people are increasingly getting plastic surgery to look like the versions of themselves they see in social media filters. \u2018There's less guilt about undergoing procedures,\u2019 says plastic and reconstructive surgeon Dr. Lara Devgan. \u2018Five or 10 years ago, people might have brought in pictures of a magazine cover supermodel. Now, they're bringing in pictures of themselves, but just in a slightly optimized way.\u2019 \u2013 Broadly<\/a><\/p>\n

11. \"One of the things I've been very interested in is feats of concentration that people used to perform all the time \u2014 [such as] writing a book in six weeks or a computer program in a few days. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s impossible now, but I do think it\u2019s become considerably harder in our environment to enter important and deep states of focus and concentration, because we surround ourselves with technology, whose business model is to distract us.<\/p>\n

\"Our computers are ostensibly productivity-enhancing machines, but they also are loaded with platforms whose business model is to consume as much of your time as possible with ads and noise and distraction.<\/p>\n

\"There\u2019s nothing wrong with taking a break, but we've engineered our environment for distraction. We bob from one thing to another, perpetually. And I don't know if it's so great for our culture or even ourselves.\" -- Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

12. \"Facebook and Google assert with merit that they are giving users what they want. The same can be said about tobacco companies and drug dealers. The people who run Facebook and Google are good people, whose well-intentioned strategies have led to horrific unintended consequences. The problem is that there is nothing the companies can do to address the harm unless they abandon their current advertising models.\u201d -- Roger McNamee<\/a>, a venture capitalist who was an early investor in Google and Facebook<\/p>\n

13. \u201cI don't know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and... it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other... It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains. The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them... was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?' And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you... more likes and comments. It's a social-validation feedback loop... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.\u201d-- Facebook's first president, Sean Parker, on social media<\/a><\/p>\n

14. \"[Users of my service], trust me. Dumb f*cks.\" \u2013 Mark Zuckerberg<\/a><\/p>\n

15. \u201cThe short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works\u2014no civil discourse, no co\u00f6peration, misinformation, mistruth.... I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds, [our children] are not allowed to use this sh*t.\" -- Chamath Palihapitiya, the former vice president of Facebook user growth<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/pjmedia.com\/trending\/15-devastating-quotes-that-show-you-how-dangerous-social-media-has-become-to-our-society\/<\/a><\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This article originally appeared in PJ MEDIA: Fifteen Devastating Quotes That Show How Dangerous Social Media Has Become to Society<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Possibilities for Consideration: Silencing what is Uncomfortable to Hear<\/h2>\n

Originally conceived to share experiences and bring us all together, social media has evolved into one of the wedges that broadens America's divide. Though it has helpful and valuable applications, it has been used for immoral purposes. A fire can be used to cook a meal and keep you warm, or it can be used to destroy. In the case of social media, it's being used to control our emotions and behavior, all for ad dollars and political agendas. <\/p>\n

The most dangerous part about it is, we don't even know it's happening to us. Originally built for good, it has grown into something different, but social media isn't our problem. The real problem is in how we have come to use it.<\/p>\n

The irresponsible use of social media is a perfect example of contempt before investigation <\/em>and the removal and replacement of due process <\/em>of law with mob rule. For an example of the effects of social media and mob rule Click here<\/strong> to read about how <\/a>America's Voice<\/a> <\/em>was used to silence Bill Cosby.<\/p>\n

Add Your Insight<\/h2>\n

Take a moment and examine\u2026<\/p>\n