I just finished reading Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, who investigated the hideous effects social media has on our societies, and his conclusions were downright mundane at this point - I am so desensitized to the idea that we are all willingly participating in our own lobotomization that I just thought “yah, that sounds right.”
Social media is not only robbing us of our focus and distracting us from the real fulfilling work we should be doing but radicalizing us also.
I’m unsure if they care how we are radicalized, they just know that inflammatory content and words like destroyed or obliterates, get us clicking like we’re playing a game of hungry hungry hippos.
Clicks and views are money, and they understand that we can’t look away from car crashes.
Next time you finish your doom scroll feeling politically enraged, know that is by design.
When you respond by using your precious time to make hateful comments online, which enrages someone else to make further hateful commentary, know that you’ve been absolutely had by the algorithm.
We like to think we are such independent thinkers, but psychology shows us how impressionable we truly are. I think it’s power to understand that we are in fact impressionable and can be manipulated, swayed, addicted, and distracted.
Humility, curiosity, and compassion become the arsenal we need: A spirit of honest self-reflection that is ever-learning, ever-questioning, and ever-connecting to humanity.
The righteous wings of anger that make one fight for what they truly believe in can be powerful catalysts of change. Using it to lambaste anonymous internet users, politicians you only see in a binary of red or blue, or your mom’s pickle ball friend Norma-Jean, is perhaps not the best use of emotional energy. How about we hit the streets, hit the books, and hit the polls instead?
Jane Pike is a creator whose expansive body of work I have always admired. To call her an equestrian mindset coach feels laughably oversimplified for someone who is one of my favourite poets, podcaster, and intellectual. She is someone I wholeheartedly trust taking life advice from.
In her latest podcast, she spoke about how the internet is making us “intellectually lazy.”
“So many of us are being compromised in our capacity to form reasoned opinions . . . If you are finding yourself name calling, critiquing, or really getting on the bandwagon with something, you need to be sure that you have fully investigated your argument. That you know what you stand for and why you stand for that thing,” said Pike.
Pike continued to urge listeners to be empathetic and understanding, “to the best of your ability,” of the other side of the argument.
“The capacity for respectful and open discourse is becoming a lost art, and we need to dedicate ourselves to that,” said Pike.
Hari spoke with a prolific researcher who told him he had started playing Candy Crush, and could feel that it was harder lately to focus on his work. The siren song of the smartphone is undoubtably stalling progress across the globe.
I think of all the art that isn’t being made because we’re staring at our phones. The relationships we aren’t cultivating, the prayers we aren't meditating on, the books we aren’t reading, the theorizing and deep thinking we aren’t doing.
I think of what a loss it would have been if Pike spent her days trolling people online and getting addicted to video games rather than building the platforms she has. I think of all the novels and articles I could have written, and the horses I could have ridden, in the collective time I’ve spent doom scrolling.
Then I invert the situation, as I love to do, and start to get excited about all that dormant potential caught up in the clogged voids of the internet.
What type of latent inventions, crafting, and breakthroughs are people capable of, if they could only manage to sever the hold these clever apps have on our brains?
