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Claiming our lives back from social media addiction

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Re: Claiming our lives back from social media addiction

#71

Post by wutbrodo »

tomjen3 wrote: post #58
notacoward wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is sad that public spaces are now full of people doing private things. Yes, they're often being social in a way, but in most of those cases they're interacting with people they already know at the expense of getting to know the new people around them. That impedes the formation of the broad and diverse web of relationships important to civic community. I don't think there's a simple answer to this. There ju…

That is one social norm. My norm is that I don't owe people my time, which you may consider rude.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that people owe anything: it was possible to keep to oneself in public spaces even pre smartphones. At the population level though, a shift in norms and behavior means that even two people who would be fine engaging with a stranger now do so less.

To be concrete, it has less to do with forcing anyone to do anything than with changing the environment such that, across the population, it's harder for those on the margin to interact socially.

Re: Claiming our lives back from social media addiction

#72

Post by wutbrodo »

erasemus wrote: post #62

My predictably unpopular theory is that highly social people are really afraid of other people. Perhaps not without reason if one regards other humans as potential predators. So they designate a group of people friends and use it as protection against all the other people. Yet they remain afraid, and this fear is what makes social interactions addictive (like gambling; the great the fear the greater the high on the o…

You may be using a very nonstandard of "highly social", but doesn't it usually also imply that you get along well with new people?

Re: Claiming our lives back from social media addiction

#73

Post by wutbrodo »

cousin_it wrote: post #12

I think of TV/gaming/internet/Facebook addiction as a generalized addiction to screens. You probably can't kick it cold turkey if your job involves looking at a screen. But you can do the next best thing: avoid all screens except your work screen. No smartphones, tablets, consoles, TVs... (A dumb phone is allowed.)

Fwiw, this doesn't align with the experience of myself and my friends. If anything, the correlation runs the other way: the people that I know who spend the most time on screens are the least active on social media, and include a couple of people who don't have any social media accounts at all.

Re: Claiming our lives back from social media addiction

#74

Post by alexandercrohde »

As a dude who doesn't use social media (no FB, linked-in, twitter, vine, snapchat, instagram, whatever I don't get the big deal.

People love writing angry posts on social media about social media. If you don't like it, don't use it, nobody is stopping you, quit the drama.

Re: Claiming our lives back from social media addiction

#75

Post by erasemus »

magic_beans wrote: post #66
erasemus wrote: post #62

My predictably unpopular theory is that highly social people are really afraid of other people. Perhaps not without reason if one regards other humans as potential predators. So they designate a group of people friends and use it as protection against all the other people. Yet they remain afraid, and this fear is what makes social interactions addictive (like gambling; the great the fear the greater the high on the o…

That's ridiculous.

Agreed.

Re: Claiming our lives back from social media addiction

#76

Post by michaelchisari »

watwut wrote: post #68
michaelchisari wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a fantastic quote from Orwell about Hitler's rise that points out that the appeal of fascism was struggle and conflict itself. I'l see if I can find it, but it is something I wonder about from a sociological standpoint: When we have our basic needs met, how do we deal with the alienation that results? If we don't deal with that alienation, can we expect someone who promises adversity to arise? Being poor, lac…

Hitler promised a lot more and did not arise to power in the situation of good economy. He promised new land under theory that Germany is overcrowded, he promised power and went up as capitalism/democracy seemed to be failing. Hitlers popularity went down when economy was better and up when it crashed. Another thing that played against socialists in Germany was knowledge of purge in Russia. Germans were scared that s…

My wording was unclear by positioning it as "the appeal" as opposed to "one of the appeals".

Hitler promised a lot of different things to a lot of different people. The Nazi party was extremely cynical in its application of promises and even ideology. One of the the most interesting and disturbing pieces of Nazi propaganda was a poster of a banker and a communist holding hands, with the caption, "Marxism is the guardian angel of capitalism."

An absurd and nonsensical statement, it was instead appealing to a particular segment of German society's emotional rejection of both the banks and communist movements.

What Orwell is referring to is not the totality of Nazi appeal, because they positions themselves to have many, often conflicting with each other, but one particular appeal to a certain segment of society.

Re: Claiming our lives back from social media addiction

#77

Post by tomjen3 »

mattbettinson wrote: post #52
jacquesm wrote: post #43

I have a little project going for the last couple of weeks. Things I got to replace the screens with: an old typewriter, a world radio and an electronics kit with which you can make a large number of different devices. Still in the works: an old fashioned wind-up alarm clock, a cassette or tape reel to reel recorder and a polaroid camera. You can get all of those for pennies or even for free on Ebay or the local equi…

>And what's more magical than to pull some Latin American station out of thin air? Pulling the entirety of Wikipedia and Youtube out of thin air? That being said, I totally agree - I love books, my manual film camera, dream of owning a typewriter (but have no use for it) and love records.

I nearly broke myself at some point because I started to realise that just by typing on a computer I was broadcasting things through space, hammering rays of light under the Atlantic, and getting a reply back in miliseconds.

If I think too much about it, I almost can't do anything because that is magic, made real.

Another good way to break yourself is to go into any reasonably sized supermarket and look, really look, at all the different products and where they come from, then imagine the insane amount of work that goes into making that possible.

I mean a typewriter is pretty cool and all, but it doesn't really compare to sending messages through space, at the speed of light.

Re: Claiming our lives back from social media addiction

#78

Post by flyinghamster »

bowlich wrote: post #42
jchw wrote: post #13

Social media and people on social media do not know us better than we know ourselves because all of us lie and try to look cool on social media. Like, can you think of the last time you saw someone clearly trying to act smart on a forum, maybe even... right here? As far as I'm concerned, all social media knows is how to exploit us. It hones in on what gets us engaged. I think that is far worse than 'knowing us' - I'd…

I'm starting to think that the hyper-engagement of fighting over every $CANDIDATE, $CAUSE, and $OUTRAGE is going to drive people away from Social Media. I started doing blackouts on Twitter and Facebook every time some major news event occurs because I just don't want to hear about it. And the one thing that I have noticed is a slow consolidation of my Facebook feed to just a narrow slice of hyper-engaged people who…

> since the "internet culture" when I got online insisted that you do not share your real-life identity* and Facebook came along and turned that entirely upside down.

That has been my number one objection to Facebook right from the start. I was long out of school when Facebook was first established, but the second I found out about the "real name" policy I thought to myself, "This can't end well."

Re: Claiming our lives back from social media addiction

#79

Post by erasemus »

wutbrodo wrote: post #72
erasemus wrote: post #62

My predictably unpopular theory is that highly social people are really afraid of other people. Perhaps not without reason if one regards other humans as potential predators. So they designate a group of people friends and use it as protection against all the other people. Yet they remain afraid, and this fear is what makes social interactions addictive (like gambling; the great the fear the greater the high on the o…

You may be using a very nonstandard of "highly social", but doesn't it usually also imply that you get along well with new people?

Yes they get along with new people and have a large number of shallow relationships. Whereas I think normies and aspies tend to have deeper relationships with only a few people. Btw, they're not aware of their motives -- they don't feel afraid (though I suppose they may have felt so when the whole process began, at school).

Re: Claiming our lives back from social media addiction

#80

Post by samschooler »

mkstowegnv wrote: post #20

In my life some of the most interesting lasting friendships were made with strangers I met in hostels while traveling and at weddings. But my recent experiences with hostels and weddings and bus stops and pretty much everywhere (even in remote areas in the third world) is that instead of talking to each other everyone is giving their attention to their smartphones. Social media needs to start making its emphasis the…

The Couchsurfing [1] app has something similar to this! You just say you want to hang out, say what you want to do (grab drinks, etc.) and people can see you if you're nearby and message you. I used it to find friends to go out with in Romania last month.

[1]: https://couchsurfing.com

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