A Re-post from Collin Horgan
https://medium.com/@cfhorgan
Despite the companies’ best efforts to convince us otherwise, we don’t need social media for all the things we’re told we need it for.
We don’t need social media to make friends or build relationships.
We don’t need it to become active or engaged in politics. We don’t need it to explore our cities or find new things to do.
We don’t need it to hail a cab or catch a bus or fly on a plane.
We don’t need it to hear new music or read new books.
We don’t need it to do our shopping.
We don’t need it to develop or discover subcultures or like-minded groups or to appreciate good design.
We don’t need it to plan our lives. And we don’t need it to understand the world.
SM encourages us to spend more time posting memes to the US and the worlds strangers that approve of us with a dopamine producing heart, then we spend in our very neighborhoods- where we can create and enjoy TRUE community!
We also don’t need social media to do the things its founders often neglect to mention it does.
We don’t need it to help make corporate or government surveillance of our lives easier. We don’t need social media to make harassment and stalking easier.
We don’t need it to spread conspiracy and violence.
We don’t need it to poison our democratic discourse or to infect our minds with dangerous anti-scientific nonsense.
We don’t even need social media to show us ads.
Who Needs it?
At the moment, the only people who actually need social media are the people who created it and continue to make money from it — and even they are using it less and less.
Instead of hoping that a breakup of a monopolistic platform like Facebook will usher in a new version of the same idea, we ought to use the opportunity to decide whether the idea itself is worth repeating.
Even Hughes admitted as much, offering an example of how using social media harms, rather than improves our lives. “Some days, lying on the floor next to my 1-year-old son, I catch myself scrolling through Instagram, waiting to see if the next image will be more beautiful than the last.”
He wrote. “What am I doing?
“I know it’s not good for me, or for my son, and yet I do it anyway“.
No Need.