How Social Media Annexes Your Cognitive Landscape

In my 2016 book, Deep Work, I proposed a strictly binary approach to social media: you should perform an honest cost/benefit analysis on the social media platforms in your life, and quit all services that don’t provide substantially more benefits than costs with respect to things you truly value. The issue with this idea, as I discovered, is that many people could identify a small number of important benefits provided to them by particular social media platforms that couldn’t be easily r...

 Review Your Social Media Timeline to Improve Your Sense o...

In an experiment at Cornell, stressed college students randomly assigned to scroll through their own Facebook profiles for five minutes experienced boosts in self-affirmation compared to students who looked at a stranger’s Facebook profile. The researchers believe self-affirmation comes from reminiscing on past meaningful interactions — seeing photos they had been tagged in and comments their friends had left — as well as reflecting on one’s own past posts, where a person chooses how ...

 Science VS Conspiracy Information Dissemination Online

Digital misinformation has become so pervasive in online social media that it has been listed by the WEF as one of the main threats to human society. Whether a news item, either substantiated or not, is accepted as true by a user may be strongly affected by social norms or by how much it coheres with the user’s system of beliefs (32, 33). Many mechanisms cause false information to gain acceptance, which in turn generate false beliefs that, once adopted by an individual, are highly resistant...

 Old Media is Text-Centric; New Media is a Collage

Modern literacy has always meant being able to both read and write narrative in the media forms of the day, whatever they may be. Just being able to read is not sufficient. For centuries, this has meant being able to consume and produce words through reading and writing and, to a lesser extent, listening and speaking. But the world of digital expression has changed all of this in three respects: New media demand new literacies. Because of inexpensive, easy-to-use, widely distributed new med...

 MySpace Destroyed History

MySpace, in a rush to relaunch and rebrand itself, made inaccessible the blogs of all of its users. There could be no movement to preserve this record of the past, as it happened so suddenly. Millions of contributions, critical records of events of a decade or so ago, lost in the blink of an eye. It’s similar to the destruction of something like Penn station: a website that was run by user-generated content, that was a central hub of Internet traffic, and that meant something to multiple mi...

 Media-User Typology (MUT) Identifies Five Types of Social...

User typesFrequency of useVariety of useTypical activityTypical platformStudiesOther labels (1) Non-users No use No use No All Largest of all user types Non-Internet users, Off the net, Inactives, Non-users, Non-users, Anxiety, (2) Sporadics Low use Low variety No particular activity, low interest, newcomers All Found in 20 studies Followers, Sporadics, Laggards, Confused and Adverse, Followers, Indifferents, Indifferent, Media Lite, Average users, Inexperienced experimenters, Risk-averse dou...