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Smartphone separation anxiety is an increasingly big trend in society because they are part of us/identity 

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Smartphone separation anxiety is an increasingly big trend in society because they are part of us/identity 

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Not having your phone can cause anxiety because they are an extension of self, and therefore people get attached. This leads to nomophobia because of proximity seeking to a part of ourselves.

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Smartphone separation anxiety is set to become an increasingly widespread problem, researchers say.

The term, which is also known as "nomophobia", is used to describe the feeling of panic or stress some people experience when they're unable to access or use their mobile phone.

According to new research, it has little to do with being unable to make or receive phone calls.

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Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

Instead, scientists from the City University of Hong Kong and the Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul say it's because smartphones are so advanced and personal to us that they've actually become an extension of ourselves.

As well as storing meaningful photos and messages, mobiles act as a gateway to an enormous range of apps, websites and services that let us quickly access content that's important to us.

"As smartphones evoke more personal memories, users extend more of their identity onto their smartphones," the research, which is published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, says.

"When users perceive smartphones as their extended selves, they are more likely to become attached to the devices, which, in turn, leads to nomophobia by heightening the phone proximity-seeking tendency."

Though they used a relatively small sample group of 300 students in South Korea for their study and conceded that it might not be fully representative of all smartphone users, they believe smartphone separation anxiety will become a bigger and bigger issue for people in the future, as technology becomes even more personalised and we grow ever more reliant upon it.

"Recent smartphone and app development seems to inevitably increase users' attachment, as the technology and related services become increasingly personalised and customisable," they added.

"This suggests that users should be conscious not to become overly dependent on smartphones while benefitting from the smartness of the technology."

Nomophobiaisn't currently classified as a specific mental disorder, but studies have shown that smartphone attachment can cause significant problems.

Earlier this year, a study from McCombs School of Business found that simply having a smartphone within reach, even if it's switched off or placed face-down, reduces cognitive capacity.

However, putting your smartphone in a different room can give your brain a boost, even if you consider yourself to be highly dependent on it.

They believe that "defined and protected" periods of separation from smartphones - not unexpected periods of separation - "may allow consumers to perform better, not just by reducing interruptions but also by increasing available cognitive capacity".

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There's a reason you feel terrible without your phone

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Smartphone separation anxiety is set to become an increasingly widespread problem, researchers say. The term, which is also known as "nomophobia", is used to describe the feeling of panic or stress some people experience when they're unable to access or use their mobile phone.

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The internet is a modern version of public stocks (shaming's). 

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The internet is a modern version of public stocks (shaming's). 

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This article explores the way people on the internet, claim to be acting morally when they completely condemn someone and ruin their life for something they posted.

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Public apologies for posting offensive things as a teen 

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Public apologies for posting offensive things as a teen 

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Public apologies are required at least, if something offensive resurfaces from past that you posted online.

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Jack Maynard has admitted that he was an 'idiot' following the re-emergence of offensive tweets he posted.

The 22-year-old was the first ever YouTuber to enter the I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! jungle, but left after he was accused of sending inappropriate messages to a 14-year-old girl in which he asked her for pictures in her bra.

As well as this, a number of deleted tweets in which Jack used the n-word and homophobic slurs were unearthed.

The vlogger has now said that his behaviour was 'disgraceful' and claimed that even his mother hated him when he was 16.

In an interview with The Sun, Jack said of his tweets: 'They're totally unacceptable and I'm praying that people learn from this and don't make the same mistakes that I did - really think about what you're going to do and how many people it could hurt.'

He apologised for using the n-word, saying he has now learned that it's unacceptable to use it even if it's in popular music.

Jack also insisted that he is not homophobic after using the slur 'f****t', saying he has 'no problem with any sexuality whatsoever' and that his use of the word was disgusting.

It was reported that Jack was 16 years old when he messaged a 14-year-old girl for provocative pictures - and after the girl refused, Jack reportedly called her a 'bore' and a 'freak'.

He said: 'What I said to her was disgusting and very, very unfair.

'I totally do respect all women. Yeah, I'm disgusted and yeah , speaking about some of that makes me feel miserable.'

Earlier in the week, Jack - who is the brother of singer Conor Maynard - apologised for sending a tweet in which he joked about rape.

He tweeted: 'I was young, naive and stupid - but as I said previously, age is no excuse. My immaturity meant that I didn't stop for a second to think whether these comments would hurt or harm anyone - something I have learnt is entirely wrong.

'If I had just thought for a moment, about how stupid they were, I would never have sent them. Nothing can justify the language I used, there is no defence - I am truly sorry. My childish attitude back then is not a representation of my thoughts and feelings now.

'I take full responsibility and regret my mistakes. As an adult, I understand the effect my words have on people, whether I have a big or small platform to speak from. Again, I am so sorry to anyone I have offended or disappointed.'

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MORE: Marcel Somerville brands Stephanie Pratt's Jonny Mitchell cheating claims 'pathetic'

MORE: Jack Maynard issues apology to 'anyone offended or disappointed' by tweets joking about rape

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Jack Maynard brands his own behaviour 'disgraceful' after leaving the jungle

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Jack Maynard has admitted that he was an 'idiot' following the re-emergence of offensive tweets he posted. The 22-year-old was the first ever YouTuber to enter the I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! jungle, but left after he was accused of sending inappropriate messages to a 14-year-old girl in which he asked her for pictures in her bra.

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Digital natives or the ‘I-generation’ are less happy/satisfied and more sad/lonely

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Digital natives or the ‘I-generation’ are less happy/satisfied and more sad/lonely

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In this article consuming social media with likened to junk food diets.  It suggests excessive smartphone use have destroyed a generation. The author of the book which is discussed says that loneliness and depressive symptoms have gone up in the generation of digital natives and happiness have gone down.

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Last week, the children's commissioner, Anne Longfield, launched a campaign to help parents regulate internet and smartphone use at home. She suggested that the overconsumption of social media was a problem akin to that of junk-food diets. "None of us, as parents, would want our children to eat junk food all the time - double cheeseburger, chips, every day, every meal," she said. "For those same reasons, we shouldn't want our children to do the same with their online time."

A few days later, former GCHQ spy agency chief Robert Hannigan responded to the campaign. "The assumption that time online or in front of a screen is life wasted needs challenging. It is driven by fear," he said. "The best thing we can do is to focus less on the time they spend on screens at home and more on the nature of the activity."

This exchange is just one more example of how children's screentime has become an emotive, contested issue. Last December, more than 40 educationalists, psychologists and scientists signed a letter in the Guardian calling for action on children's "screen-based lifestyles". A few days later, another 40-odd academics described the fears as "moral panic" and said that any guidelines needed to build on evidence rather than "scaremongering".

Faced with these conflicting expert views, how should concerned parents proceed? Into this maelstrom comes the American psychologist Jean Twenge, who has written a book entitled iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy - and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood - and What That Means for the Rest of Us.

If the book's title didn't make her view clear enough, last weekend an excerpt was published in the American magazine the Atlantic with the emotive headline "Have smartphones destroyed a generation?" It quickly generated differing reactions that were played out on social media - these could be broadly characterised as praise from parents and criticism from scientists. In a phone interview and follow-up emails, Twenge explained her conclusions about the downsides of the connected world for teens, and answered some of her critics.

The Atlantic excerpt from your book was headlined "Have smartphones destroyed a generation?" Is that an accurate reflection of what you think?
Well, keep in mind that I didn't write the headline. It's obviously much more nuanced than that.

So why did you write this book?
I've been researching generations for a long time now, since I was an undergraduate, almost 25 years. The databases I draw from are large national surveys of high school and college students, and one of adults. In 2013-14 I started to see some really sudden changes and at first I thought maybe these were just blips, but the trends kept going.

I'd never seen anything like it in all my years of looking at differences among generations. So I wondered what was going on.

What were these sudden changes for teens?
Loneliness and depressive symptoms started to go up, while happiness and life satisfaction started to go down. The other thing that I really noticed was the accelerated decline in seeing friends in person - it falls off a cliff. It's an absolutely stunning pattern - I'd never seen anything like that. I really started to wonder, what is going on here? What happened around 2011-2012 [the survey data is a year or two behind] that would cause such sudden changes?

And you concluded these changes were being brought about by increased time spent online?
The high-school data detailed how much time teens spend online on social media and games and I noticed how that correlated with some of these indicators in terms of happiness, depression and so on.

I was curious not just what the correlations were between these screen activities, mental health and wellbeing, but what were the links with non-screen activities, like spending time with friends in person, playing sports, going to religious services, doing homework, all these other things that teens do?

And for happiness in particular, the pattern was so stark. Of the non-screen activities that were measured, they all correlated with greater happiness. All the screen activities correlated with lower happiness.

You've called these post-millennials the iGeneration. What are their characteristics?
I'm defining iGen as those born between 1995 and 2012 - that latter date could change based on future data. I'm reasonably certain about 1995, given the sudden changes in the trends. It also happens that 1995 was the year the internet was commercialised [Amazon launched that year, Yahoo in 1994 and Google in 1996], so if you were born in that year you have not known a time without the internet.

But the introduction of the smartphone, exemplified by the iPhone, which was launched in 2007, is key?
There are a lot of differences - some are large, some are subtle, some are sudden and some had been building for a while - but if I had to identify what really characterises them, the first influence is the smartphone.

iGen is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence with the smartphone. This has led to many ripple effects for their wellbeing, their social interactions and the way they think about the world.

Why are you convinced they are unhappy because of social media, rather than it being a case of the unhappy kids being heavier users of social media?
That is very unlikely to be true because of very good research on that very question. There is one experiment and two longitudinal studies that show the arrow goes from social media to lower wellbeing and not the other way around. For example, an experiment where people gave up Facebook for a week and had better wellbeing than those who had not.

The other thing to keep in mind is that if you are spending eight hours a day with a screen you have less time to spend interacting with friends and family in person and we know definitively from decades of research that spending time with other people is one of the keys to emotional wellbeing; if you're doing that less, that's a very bad sign.

A professor at Oxford University tweeted that your work is a "non-systematic review of sloppy social science as a tool for lazy intergenerational shaming" - how do you respond?
It is odd to equate documenting teens' mental health issues with "intergenerational shaming". I'm not shaming anyone and the data I analyse is from teens, not older people criticising them.

This comment is especially strange because this researcher's best-known paper, about what he calls the "Goldilocks theory", shows the same thing I find - lower wellbeing after more hours of screen time. We're basically replicating each other's research across two different countries, which is usually considered a good thing. So I am confused.

Your arguments also seem to have been drawn on by the conservative right as ammunition for claims that technology is leading to the moral degradation of the young. Are you comfortable about that?
My analyses look at what young people are saying about themselves and how they are feeling, so I don't think this idea of "older people love to whine about the young" is relevant. I didn't look at what older people have to say about young people. I looked at what young people are saying about their own experiences and their own lives, compared to young people 10, 20, or 30 years ago.

Nor is it fair or accurate to characterise this as "youth-bashing". Teens are saying they are suffering and documenting that should help them, not hurt them. I wrote the book because I wanted to give a voice to iGen and their experiences, through the 11 million who filled out national surveys, to the 200 plus who answered open-ended questions for me, to the 23 I talked to for up to two hours. It had absolutely nothing to do with older people and their "complaints" about youth.

Many of us have a nagging feeling that social media is bad for our wellbeing, but we all suffer from a fear of missing out.
Teens feel that very intensely, which is one reason why they are so addicted to their phones. Yet, ironically, the teens who spend more time on social media are actually more likely to report feeling left out.

But is this confined to iGeners? One could go to a child's birthday party where the parents are glued to their smartphones and not talking to each other too.
It is important to consider that while this trend also affects adults, it is particularly worrisome for teens because their brain development is ongoing and adolescence is a crucial time for developing social skills.

Many tech-connected people in Silicon Valley restrict their own children's screen use - so they know its effects.

You say teens might know the right emoji but in real life might not know the right facial expression.
There is very little research on that question. There is one study that looked at the effects of screens on social skills among 11- to 12-year-olds, half of whom used screens at their normal level and half went to a five-day screen-free camp.

Those who attended the camp improved their social skills - reading emotions on faces was what they measured. That makes sense - that's the social skill you would expect to suffer if you weren't getting much in-person social interaction.

So is it up to regulators or parents to improve the situation? Leaving this problem for parents to fix is a big challenge.
Yes it is. I have three kids and my oldest is 10, but in her class about half have a phone, so many of them are on social media already. Parents have a tough job, because there are temptations on the screen constantly.

What advice would you give parents?
Put off getting your child a phone for as long as possible and, when you do, start with one that doesn't have internet access so they don't have the internet in their pocket all the time.

But when your child says, "but all my friends have got one", how do you reply?
Maybe with my parents' line - "If your friends all jumped in the lake, would you do it too?" Although at that age the answer is usually yes, which I understand. But you can do social media on a desktop computer for a limited time each day. When we looked at the data, we found that an hour a day of electronic device use doesn't have any negative effects on mental health - two hours a day or more is when you get the problems.

The majority of teens are on screens a lot more than that. So if they want to use Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook to keep up with their friends' activities, they can do that from a desktop computer.

That sounds hard to enforce.
We need to be more understanding of the effects of smartphones. In many ways, parents are worried about the wrong things - they're worried about their kids driving and going out. They don't worry about their kids sitting by themselves in a room with their phone and they should.

Lots of social media features such as notifications or Snapchat's Snapstreak feature are engineered to keep us glued to our phones. Should these types of features be outlawed?
Oh man. Parents can put an app [such as Kidslox or Screentime] on their kid's phone to limit the amount of time they spend on it. Do that right away. In terms of the bigger solutions, I think that's above my pay grade to figure out.

You've been accused by another psychologist of cherry-picking your data. Of ignoring, say, studies that suggest active social media use is associated with positive outcomes such as resilience. Did you collect data to fit a theory?
It's impossible to judge that claim - she does not provide citations to these studies. I found a few studies finding no effects or positive effects, but they were all older, before smartphones were on the scene. She says in order to prove smartphones are responsible for these trends we need a large study randomly assigning teens to not use smartphones or use them. If we wait for this kind of study, we will wait for ever - that type of study is just about impossible to conduct.

She concludes by saying: "My suspicion is that the kids are gonna be OK." However, it is not OK that 50% more teens suffer from major depression now versus just six years ago and three times as many girls aged 12 to 14 take their own lives. It is not OK that more teens say that they are lonely and feel hopeless. It is not OK that teens aren't seeing their friends in person as much. If we twiddle our thumbs waiting for the perfect experiment, we are taking a big risk and I for one am not willing to do that.

Are you expecting anyone from Silicon Valley to say: "How can we help?"
No, but what I think is interesting is many tech-connected people in Silicon Valley restrict their own children's screen use, so they know. They're living off of it but they know its effects. It indicates that pointing out the effects of smartphones doesn't make you a luddite.
iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy -and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood - and What That Means for the Rest of Us by Jean Twenge is published by Simon & Schuster US ($27) on 22 August

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Are smartphones really making our children sad?

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Last week, the children's commissioner, Anne Longfield, launched a campaign to help parents regulate internet and smartphone use at home. She suggested that the overconsumption of social media was a problem akin to that of junk-food diets. "None of us, as parents, would want our children to eat junk food all the time - double cheeseburger, chips, every day, every meal," she said.

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What if facebook pay people for their data

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What if facebook pay people for their data

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This is a satirical article which imagines a future where unlike the present situation, people are paid for paying users a fixed portion of what it takes from a user per month and what fakebook would be like if it removed advertisement. This does seem like a fairer way to deal with a social media site prized on making connections and friendships, while simultaneously exploiting this desire to connect.

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It's 2033, and it's been a great year for the Facebook group of companies, including Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. Can you believe how far they've come since the dark days of 2018?

Some of you might be too young to remember, but back then, Facebook was accused of using addictive techniques to snag peoples' attention; of letting awful, cynical information-warfare outfits use people's data to try to disrupt societies and even throw elections; and of empowering the most hateful people and groups.

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Facebook sure didn't help its own case. The company initially dismissed mounting evidence that its mysterious algorithms had enabled the spread of "fake news" and empowered the worst elements of society to spread online bile. It published studies showing it could make people sad; internal memos came to light suggesting it would be OK if people died because of Facebook's quest for growth; and while it's hard to believe today, a young Mark Zuckerberg even ridiculed the earliest people to use his designs.

What changed? What turned the company around? One day-perhaps around the time he got hauled before a panel of angry lawmakers on Capitol Hill-Zuckerberg realized he had started to act as if he ran a tobacco company, and he decided it was a lousy role. (Oh, question in the back? Right-tobacco was a plant that people used to smoke. It was addictive and caused cancer. Regulators pounded tobacco companies until they faded from the scene.)

The problem with tobacco companies was that if they stopped selling the carcinogenic, addictive stuff, there was nothing left for them to sell. So, all they could do was fight regulators for as long as possible.

Incredibly, Facebook, a Silicon Valley technology company, had somehow gotten itself into the same bind. It was selling an addictive but damaging thing, and it fought against regulators for the longest time, as if it had no other options. But of course, in Facebook's case, it wasn't true. Facebook changed its business model, and as a result it became the beloved company it is today.

Facebook's original, stupid business model insisted that if two people wished to interact, the only way their contact could be financed was through a third party who paid Facebook for the opportunity to try to manipulate them. It started out innocently enough, with traditional advertisers, but computers got faster and cheaper, algorithms got better, and Facebook's customers-who weren't its users-got better and better at manipulation. (That's right, the people who were paying Facebook were not the same as the people who were using it. Weird, right?)

Because Facebook's users were glued to devices like smartphones, a ton of data about them was available. A lot of user data wasn't even entered consciously. Algorithms would keep track of which colors a person responded to and what that person's friends responded to. A giant web of correlations allowed Facebook to create predictive models of how people would react. These models were certainly not perfect. In fact, they were just barely good enough to be useful.

But they meant that Facebook's digital experiences could be adapted to become ever more addictive and influential. It was like every user became a rat in a behaviorist's cage, being conditioned on an ongoing basis by remote parties no one understood. It was like a stranger paying your hypnotist.

Maybe it would not have been so bad if human psychology worked differently. But negative emotions like paranoia, fear, resentment and status anxiety can be stimulated quickly and then take a while to dissipate. Positive ones like generosity, confidence, compassion and open-mindedness about people who are different are slow to rise and can be shattered quickly. Because Facebook's customers were spending based on constant quick feedback, from their point of view negative emotions were great bargains in getting and keeping attention. Society darkened as negative people were amplified.

Misinformation, too, was amplified to an insane degree. Real events were typically less well-tuned than made-up events to invoke those valuable negative emotions; the real world is too complex and nuanced. So false reports started to become incredibly influential not only on Facebook, but on the platforms of other companies that used the same business model, like Google. Sadists and haters found an ideal environment in which they would be amplified. What a twisted world that was.

To their credit, Facebook and its competitors tried to police the negativity-eventually. They wrote algorithms to detect the creepy stuff. They hired armies of censors to sift through mountains of it. The core problem, however, was that Facebook's platform was adaptive by design. Facebook let other companies create apps within it, and gave advertisers significant choice in how to position and target their ads. It was an "out of control" design, which has many benefits, as long as the incentives that motivate unforeseen uses of the system are desirable.

In Facebook's case, the form of openness it supported meant that the customers and bad actors would always find a way to adapt around restrictions as they chased after the incentives Facebook enshrined. The sole commercial incentive was to always seek more efficient ways to manipulate people.

If a bad actor could not siphon off data through an app running on Facebook to target users, then maybe there would instead be a storm of bots "shitposting," for instance. (Sorry to use that language, but that's what it was called.) These botnets pushed incendiary memes that would cause a slight decrease in voter turnout for a candidate, for instance-as in the infamous campaign on behalf of President Donald Trump, who served two terms from 2017 through 2024.

The word "slight" is important! The effects were small, but because there was so much data, they were predictable. A clever player can leverage slight but predictable changes to create large effects-think compound interest. Another example is W. Edwards Deming's concept of "quality" in business. Slight, incremental, but carefully measured improvements in product quality accumulated to create vastly more reliable cars, for instance. (This happened back in the 20th century, initially in Japan, when cars were still driven by people.)

So, Facebook's perverse business model amplified paranoia, cynicism and bullying. Yet Zuckerberg defended it as if it were the crown jewel. When Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook and many other people pointed out that there were other business models, Zuckerberg mocked them. Isn't it always better to make things free, he said?

***

Back here in 2018, Zuckerberg is in a prison that he can't seem to figure out how to break out of. He is testifying this week before committees in the Senate and the House because we are in the middle of a crisis, and people expect him to do something about it. Suspicion and fear of Facebook may be the last area of bipartisan agreement.

The ideology of making things free is deep and dear to tech culture. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, told NBC News last week that Facebook users can't opt out of sharing their data with advertisers because that would require Facebook to be " a paid product." But at the same time, techies also dearly love hero-entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs. So, a puzzle: How can you have hero entrepreneurs when everything is to be free?

Advertising is the only way to combine the two ideals. That's how Facebook's problem started. It was the interference pattern between incompatible dreams.

But it turns out that free isn't always best. Back when the Web was new, a lot of techies thought that volunteerism should dominate enterprises like television production. A lot of people tried to organize Wikipedia-like ways to make movies and TV, but when companies like Netflix, HBO and Amazon charged fees, something amazing happened. TV got better. We now live in the age of "Peak TV."

What would "Peak Social Media" look like? Maybe it would be a service that could provide ways for people to get quick, authoritative medical advice without weird paranoid drivel about how vaccines are inherently bad. (Conspiracy theories drive engagement, so they create profit for Facebook.) Telemedicine is a potential revenue source. What if, instead of taking a kid with an infection to a medical waiting room with a bunch of other sick and vulnerable people, you could pay medical providers through Facebook to conduct an initial exam, using internet video and at-home devices?Entrepreneurs could invent ways to make the experience better; nurses and doctors could find a convenient new income stream; and users would be happy to pay.

Suddenly, the users would also be the customers. Suddenly, Facebook would be making money without the creepy incentives of a manipulation-based economy.

The change could start with a small tweak to Facebook's algorithms. Because positive emotions emerge more slowly than negative emotions, if Facebook's advertisers received feedback less quickly, they would see engagement data based on a broader mix of emotional reactions, including more positive ones. By simply putting a delay in its feedback loop to advertisers, Facebook can, I suspect, bring about less negativity. That's one way to make Facebook better that wouldn't involve repressing Facebook's customers or censoring its users.

I don't mean this as a fanciful proposal, but as a practical one for right now, today. Facebook's executives have made rejecting the idea of changing the company's core business model a highlight of their current charm offensive, but they are wrong. It is in their interests-and not just everyone else's-for Facebook to change its business model. The alternative is to become a digital tobacco company.

The transition wouldn't be a trivially obvious project. Considerable invention and innovation would be required, but perhaps less than will be required to resist and evade regulators if Facebook insists on staying on its current path.

To diversify its revenue, Facebook could bill its users through a subscription plan, like Netflix, or it could invent a system based on accumulated nano-payments for usage. Or it could combine the two through a metered system, like the one the New York Times and others use, which permits a limited amount of free usage each month.

Similarly, users should be paid for their data. This could be accomplished in a way that combines the market value of users' data with latitude to demand varying fees, according to a user's preference. And remember, the concept of data should be understood broadly, encompassing intentionally created data like cat videos and unintentional data like behavior logs and health information.

A kind of royalty payment for data could compress a large and complicated set of privacy decisions into a simple decision. If you value privacy more than income, you could set your price high, perhaps to infinity, so that no one could afford to use your data. If you're starting out and wish to advertise yourself, you could set it low so that your data would be out there, a lot. Most people would hover in the middle, perhaps with the help of services that could set their prices on an ongoing basis to maximize income. People would be directly motivated to produce more valuable data, an optimization that is thwarted when third parties make commercial decisions instead of participants.

A royalty model for data could help people build a new kind of security over a lifetime. Because artificial intelligence needs data from masses of people, paying royalties for the use of that data could provide an alternate means of support for people displaced by A.I., a means that is honest about where the value comes from, and that motivates users to create better data. By acknowledging that data is real and valuable, the economy would expand. Just because Facebook users would be asked to pay to use the service doesn't mean they would have less money as a result.

This is a deep topic, and it's not possible to fully describe a future with a different business model for services like social media and search in a brief piece like this. But this better future is achievable, if only Silicon Valley would rediscover the courage and imagination that created the computer industry the first place.

***

That's why, in 2033, we look back on 2018 as the year when Peak Social Media began. All kinds of people started to both pay for services and get paid over Facebook. Today, anyone who uses Facebook is both a customer and a content or service provider, and that mix changes for all of us, day to day. Only a minority of the Facebook community makes its living from Facebook, but that's still a lot of people, and a big part of the overall economy. There are some who need subsidies to participate. Most of us pay a low fee and get a great deal.

Along with telemedicine, another early opportunity created by Peak Social Media was found in education. In the very early 21st century, there was an explosion of online courses about topics like math and programming, but they were not centered on personal interactions with teachers. When social media finally become part of the mainstream economy, teachers finally found a way to make a decent living. More and more students gained the skills they needed to participate in our modern economy, in which robot tamers, DNA artists and VR performers are the highest-paid professionals.

The smartest thing Zuckerberg did was incredibly basic: He set down a simple rule. During the long period when the person-to-person economy was rising, Facebook would never pay out more to users than a fixed portion of what it took in from users in a given month. While the transition was slow, it was always profitable. The transition was smooth and safe. And today, we all celebrate that the transition is complete. This morning, Facebook announced that it has sold its final advertisement. From now on, the user will be the customer.

Facebook moved slow and fixed things.

This article tagged under:

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It's 2033, and it's been a great year for the Facebook group of companies, including Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. Can you believe how far they've come since the dark days of 2018?

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This demonstrates the struggles of teenagers discovering their identity online. They do not have margin of error in choices they make or things they say because these are recorded online before they have time to learn what they mean. This article explores jack Maynard being kicked out of the celebrity jungle because of offensive tweets he tweeted as a teenager.

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YouTube star Jack Maynard has left the I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here! jungle.

The brother of singer Conor Maynard has faced allegations of racism and homophobia in recent days after old tweets emerged online.

In a statement his publicist confirmed he would be leaving the ITV show after just over two days in order to be given the chance to defend himself against allegations.

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Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

They said Maynard agreed with the decision which was "made by his representatives and ITV".

The statement added: "In the last few days Jack Maynard has been the subject of a succession of media stories which, given his position as a contestant on I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here! - filmed in the Australian jungle, with no contact with the outside world, he has been unable to respond to.

"Since it is only fair that everyone should be aware of any allegations made against them and should also have the right to defend themselves, it was agreed that it would be better to bring him out of the show."

In historic tweets obtained by The Sun, Maynard posted between 2011 and 2013, the well known vlogger posted a series of racist and homophobic slurs. He was also alleged to have mocked people with facial deformities.

Maynard appeared on Tuesday night's show but presenters Ant and Dec confirmed his removal halfway through the programme, telling viewers they could not vote for him in Wednesday's bushtucker trial.

The show also saw Amir Khan recover his boxing champion reputation after he was again chosen to take on the bushtucker trial.

The Olympian struggled in the series' first challenge as he screamed the inevitable phrase to end the task before its completion.

Voted by the public to take on a second trial - which saw him locked in a tank which filled with water and having to open a series of boxes with a spanner - Khan recovered from his earlier woes to win food for his five campmates who already had a meal ticket and also managed to bag one more.

After battling 200 crayfish, eels, yabbies, mud crabs and jungle critters, Khan told Ant and Dec: "I was so focused. I wouldn't let me teammates down in camp. It was so hard in there honestly. I can go back now and make my camp smile."

No hype, just the advice and analysis you need

He added: "It was exciting, it was challenging. It was very, very hard but we've already got five guaranteed meals and I've got one extra one for my team. It makes me very happy today. I'm very proud of myself."

After being congratulated by his teammates, Khan offered the meal ticket to Stanley Johnson, father to Boris Johnson, who said he "shall do my best to deserve the honour".

There was some sweet relief for those without meal tickets, however, after Johnson and Georgia Toffolo bagged some brownies after successfully completing the dingo dollar challenge.
Press Association

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A famous YouTuber has been kicked off I'm a Celebrity for alleged racism and homophobia

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YouTube star Jack Maynard has left the I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here! jungle. The brother of singer Conor Maynard has faced allegations of racism and homophobia in recent days after old tweets emerged online.

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This article explores a key facet of presumption in that it generates profit for Facebook. If you use this site you are making money for companies through your interaction. Facebook is as much an advertisement company as it is a social network. Thus, through your free account you are essentially working for Facebook as a free-labourer.

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Image: bob al-greene/mashable

Chances are, you work for Facebook.

You probably don't have an office or an ID card. And you almost certainly don't get paid. But if you're one of the 239 million Americans who use the platform each month, your work is as valuable as a coder's. Maybe more. Your clicks, likes, and posts keep content circulating, users scrolling, and data streaming into algorithms used to serve you ads. Leave, and the platform crumbles.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal has driven away some users - mostly those troubled by how Facebook harvests personal information. But don't forget that Facebook takes something else from you, too: your labor.

You do two jobs for Facebook. You generate data and produce content. Facebook is essentially an advertising company, and every bit of information you disclose is data advertisers can use to influence how and what you buy. Sometimes it's fairly benign (maybe you do want that Blue Apron subscription). Other times it's not. Data is a powerful tool for anyone who wants to shape your behavior, and as Cambridge Analytica shows, it can be dangerous.

Your job is to drive people to the platform and keep them there

You also create most of what's on Facebook. You write posts, share photos, and capture live video of speeches, protests, and police shootings. The time and effort you sink into crafting a poetic confession, an impassioned rant, a thoughtful reflection on the day's news - think of it as work you do for Facebook. You're working to keep the site humming and vibrant, and you're creating reasons for others to keep scrolling. Your job is to drive people to the platform and keep them there.

And you spend a lot of time doing it. In 2016, users spent an average of 50 minutes a day using Facebook products, including Instagram and Messenger. That number has declined recently, but let's say you spend, say, 35 minutes a day on the site. That's 26 eight-hour days a year - "more than any other leisure activity surveyed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with the exception of watching television programs and movies," according to the New York Times. "It's more time than people spend reading (19 minutes); participating in sports or exercise (17 minutes); or social events (four minutes)."

Time Well Spent?

Leisure is labor on Facebook. People use the app voluntarily, and yet, as more and more social activities relocate to the internet, it's increasingly work people feel they have to do to live meaningful, connected lives. Facebook is a News Feed, photo album, personal archive, community forum, and more. Think, for a second, about deleting Facebook. What will happen to your photos? Where will you get your news? Will anyone remember your birthday?

Like all social media companies, Facebook makes money from the basic labors of life: our need to maintain friendships and family ties, keep up with news, form and share beliefs about the world. "What appears, at first glance, to be a free activity of communication," researchers at the University Lüneburg and University of Essex wrote in a recent paper, "is in fact a form of 'free labor.'"

It's valuable labor, too. The company earned nearly $16 billion in profit in 2017, according to its annual earnings report. Most of that was from ad revenue, which jumped nearly 50 percent.

Free labor has always made the U.S. economy hum. Slavery got the country on its feet, and unpaid house work - cooking, cleaning and child care, still done mostly by women - has for over two centuries made it possible for people to wake up every morning and go to work. The effort we put into caring for others is labor, and women still do most of that, too. While employers mostly benefit from this unpaid work indirectly, social media companies go right to the source. They extract value directly from the work we do to stay connected to the world.

This kind of extraction isn't unique to Facebook, or even to social media. The idea of a "prosumer" - a consumer who also produces - dates back to the 1980s. Sites like Yelp rely on users to generate reviews; Spotify asks listeners to fill in missing album data; Medium makes money from amateur writers looking to publish. Like Facebook, these sites often frame your work as an opportunity to "connect" or "share." Not paying for this work is called "crowdsourcing."

Critics of this model say it's exploitation. Eric Posner, a legal theorist at the University of Chicago, has called Twitter users a " slave labor force," and small-time YouTube celebrities have objected to the platform's efforts to make it harder for YouTubers to monetize videos.

Whatever else it is, social media is work

Whatever else it is, social media is work. People who create content for a living understand this better than most. If you're a photographer, you have to be on Instagram. And if you're a journalist, you have to be on Twitter. It's where you find breaking news, promote work, and get gigs - often on your own time. Ditching Twitter "would be a disaster" for writers and the companies they work for, Ethan Klapper, HuffPost's global social media editor, told the New Republic in 2017.

The nonstop churn of social media skews what kind of work has monetary value. Amateur reporters break news before professionals, so media companies expect writers to churn out reports off the clock. And when the internet is awash in content, no one wants to shell out for words and images they can get for free.

Yes, a few social media users have figured out how to turn their work into cash. Modern celebrities like PewDiePie and the #vanlife couple have used social platforms to launch lucrative careers. It's easy to envy these people; after all, they rake in cash doing what everyone else does for free. But the fact that some people get paid is evidence of the value of every user's labor.

Maybe we all deserve a little something. After all, we don't really use Facebook; we make it.

Casey Williams is a writer based in Durham, North Carolina. He covers issues from labor rights to environmental politics. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and other national and local outlets.

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Forget data. Free labor is Facebook's lifeblood

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Chances are, you work for Facebook. You probably don't have an office or an ID card. And you almost certainly don't get paid. But if you're one of the 239 million Americans who use the platform each month, your work is as valuable as a coder's. Maybe more.

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Presenting yourself on social media to convey parts of you personality 

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Presenting yourself on social media to convey parts of you personality 

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This article examines what a profile picture says about your personality. This relates to presentation of the self, and the idealised version of themselves people want to display online.  For example, in the article it claims if you are ‘agreeable’ then they generally post poor photos of themselves but are smiling in them.

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You can bet the guy holding the surfboard is out-doorsy and chill, the one with the metal T-shirt isn't, and the girl making pouty selfie face is probably pretty concerned with her appearance. But beyond this sort of obvious amateur detective work, what else can you learn about a person from just a glimpse of their social media profile pic?

According to science, way more than you imagine.

The "Big 5" personality traits and your profile picture

What astrology is to women's magazines and Myers-Briggs is to corporate recruiting, " the Big 5" is to scientific discussions of personality. The research-validated framework for classifying personalities rates people along five dimensions: introversion-extraversion, openness to new experiences, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Turns out just a quick glance at your Twitter pic is enough for someone to rate you fairly accurately on many of these dimensions, a new study highlighted by PsyBlog suggests. Here's what the researchers discovered when they compared a scientific analysis of thousands of participants' personalities to their social media profile pictures:

Conscientiousness: "More conscientious people used pictures that were more natural, colorful and bright. They expressed the most emotions of all the different personality types," explains PsyBlog.

Openness: Awesome pics tended to belong to those high in openness (this trait is strongly linked with creativity). The pictures had more contrast and were generally more artistic or unusual. If the face takes up more of the frame than usual that's also a good sign of openness.

Extraversion: No surprises here: extraverts were often shown surrounded by others, used colorful photos, and smiled broadly.

Neuroticism: A simple photo with little color is a sign of high neuroticism. "People higher in neuroticism... were more likely to show a blank expression or even to be hiding their face," PsyBlog adds.

Agreeableness: Nice people aren't the best photographers it turns out. "Highly agreeable people post relatively poor pictures of themselves...but they are probably smiling and the pictures are bright and lively," the research showed.

Do you think you can often get a good initial sense of someone's personality just from a profile pic? And if so, do these findings match your personal observations?

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What Your Profile Picture Says About Your Personality, According to Science

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You can bet the guy holding the surfboard is out-doorsy and chill, the one with the metal T-shirt isn't, and the girl making pouty selfie face is probably pretty concerned with her appearance. But beyond this sort of obvious amateur detective work, what else can you learn about a person from just a glimpse of their social media profile pic?

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Big data companies can influence how people think – but are they? And how will we know for sure?

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Big data companies can influence how people think – but are they? And how will we know for sure?

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People are chosen without their knowledge (or explicit consent) to be emotional lab rats. If Facebook have the power to induce certain emotions in people, then they have the power to influence elections – but are they using this power? If so, would we ever know?

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Around the time of the Indian election in May, a badly-headlined story began spreading which asked "Did Google affect the outcome of the Indian election?" The answer was no, it hadn't. But beneath the headline was an iceberg.

A non-peer-reviewed study, not carried out by anyone affiliated with Google, looked at the effects on undecided voters of tweaking the search engine's search results on different candidates - showing positive or negative results. Though not rigorous, it did highlight the possibility that if Google were so minded, it could influence floating voters, and so any close election.

Google responded that "Our results reflect what's on the web, and we rigorously protect the integrity of our algorithms. It would undermine people's trust in our results and company if we were to change course."

Larry Page, Google's chief executive, expressed his frustration last week with peoples' lack of trust in "big data" companies like his own. If only we would let companies mine our health data, we could save 100,000 lives every year, he argued. "We get so worried about [data privacy] that we don't get the benefits," he said.

Undermining the feed

Page, and others at Google, might therefore be unhappy at the way that Facebook is again undermining our trust. During a January week in 2012, around 700,000 English-speaking Facebook users were chosen, without their knowledge (or explicit consent) to be emotional lab rats. The researchers found that if you tweak what people see in their Facebook Newsfeed - the scrolling information on your page - to suppress or heighten certain emotional words, readers' emotions will shift to match.

It's not only emotions Facebook can nudge. It can make you vote too. On presidential election day 2010 it offered one group in the US a graphic with a link to find nearby polling stations, along with a button that would let you announce that you'd voted, and the profile photos of six other of your "friends" who had already done so. Users shown that page were 0.39% more likely to vote than those in the "control" group, who hadn't seen the link, button or photos.

The researchers reckoned they'd mobilised 60,000 voters - and that the ripple effect caused a total of 340,000 extra votes. That's significantly more than George Bush won by in 2000, where Florida hung on just 537 votes.

As the New Republic points out, what if Mark Zuckerberg - or some future Facebook chief - wants to influence a future election? The growing amount of data suggests that subtly influencing peoples' opinions, and voting turnout, could be engineered to prod voting in one direction or the other.

Fraud at polls?

It's hardly a new concern; Orson Welles described it in Citizen Kane, whose newspaper-owning proprietor seeks election victory through biasing the news he publishes. And the fictional Kane, of course, was based on the real-life newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst - who then used his influence to suppress Welles.

But what's different from the scenario in Kane is that we can't compare what we're seeing with anything else; these aren't biased newspaper articles, they're a sort of biased reality. If our friends all seem a little down, judging by their Facebook posts, or if we're being constantly urged to vote, we can't see the hidden hand behind it. Subliminal advertising has been banned in most countries for decades. Now Facebook, one of the few online advertising behemoths, seems to have reinvented it - for things which aren't exactly advertising. They're about how we feel about each other, and what we do.

That's a worry. Concerns about Google or Facebook biasing an election might seem far-fetched. But until a few weeks ago, the idea that a few people in California would set out to silently change how around half a million people feel would have seemed weird too.

The most worrying thing? That hardly anyone is surprised that this is possible. In which case, what are the limits of possibility in this tweaking of our online environment? Page may be dismayed at our lack of trust. But we keep being given reasons not to trust what happens with our data. There's no simple resolution - because even if these experiments stop being published, we can't be sure they'll stop.
* How does Facebook decide what to show in my News Feed? Topics

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If Facebook can tweak our emotions and make us vote, what else can it do?

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Around the time of the Indian election in May, a badly-headlined story began spreading which asked "Did Google affect the outcome of the Indian election?" The answer was no, it hadn't. But beneath the headline was an iceberg.

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Facebook using grey area excuse of what is ethical experiment/willing participant 

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Facebook using grey area excuse of what is ethical experiment/willing participant 

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Facebook apologises for again blurring ethical boundaries. Many people are not aware what they are signing up to when they skip the terms and conditions of Facebook. So much so, they sign away their right to privacy and sign themselves up for secret psychological testing.

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Facebook's second most powerful executive, Sheryl Sandberg, has apologised for the conduct of secret psychological tests on nearly 700,000 users in 2012, which prompted outrage from users and experts alike.

The experiment, revealed by a scientific paper published in the March issue of Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, hid "a small percentage" of emotional words from peoples' news feeds, without their knowledge, to test what effect that had on the statuses or "likes" that they then posted or reacted to.

"This was part of ongoing research companies do to test different products, and that was what it was; it was poorly communicated," said Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer while in New Delhi. "And for that communication we apologise. We never meant to upset you."

The statement by Sandberg, deputy to chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, is a marked climbdown from its insistence on Tuesday that the experiment was covered by its terms of service. The secret tests mean that the company faces an inquiry from the UK's information commissioner, while the publishers of the paper have said they will investigate whether any ethics breach took place. Psychological tests on human subjects have to have "informed consent" from participants - but independent researchers and Facebook have disagreed on whether its terms of service implicitly cover such use.

Facebook's first public comment on the experiments came as the social network attempted to woo Indian advertisers as part of its efforts to tailor adverts to users outside of the US. The aim of the government-sponsored study was to see whether positive or negative words in messages would lead to positive or negative content in status updates.

The company's researchers decided after tweaking the content of peoples' "news feeds" that there was "emotional contagion" across the social network, by which people who saw one emotion being expressed would themselves express similar emotions.

"We take privacy and security at Facebook really seriously because that is something that allows people to share" opinions and emotions, said Sandberg.

The UK data protection watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), is investigating the experiment to determine whether Facebook has infringed on UK law.

The social network also faced stern criticism from commentators and researchers, over is handling of the experiment which was not explained to users and therefore was performed without their permission, with some referring to it as "creepy", "evil", "terrifying" and "super disturbing".

Facebook later added a "research" policy to its terms and conditions, four months after the experiment took place.

* If Facebook can tweak our emotions and make us vote, what else can it do?
Topics

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Facebook apologises for psychological experiments on users

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Facebook's second most powerful executive, Sheryl Sandberg, has apologised for the conduct of secret psychological tests on nearly 700,000 users in 2012, which prompted outrage from users and experts alike.

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Surveillance capitalism and building a data empire through intrusive cross company data sharing

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Surveillance capitalism and building a data empire through intrusive cross company data sharing

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A key part of surveillance capitalism is that your personal data is a commodity.  Data is being shared between different companies under the guise of helping people when really it is trying to increase profits.

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Facebook responded to the story with a long blog post in which the company argued that the data-sharing "work was about helping people" do things on the internet "like seeing recommendations from their Facebook friends-on other popular apps and websites, like Netflix, The New York Times, Pandora, and Spotify."

Which, sure: That was one thing that these data-sharing partnerships allowed. But they also allowed Facebook to grow, and grow, and grow. To entrench itself everywhere in the social-media ecosystem. Facebook was happy to trade user data to expand its business operations, and to pretend that this was all about users defies reality. Users got a small "improvement" that they didn't ask for. Facebook got permits to build the pipes underlying its data empire.

Back when the data-sharing partnerships began, in 2010, the vision Facebook had of itself could be called Everything-but-With-Facebook. The service would be the social spine for all other services on the web. You'd log in with it, share through it, integrate your Facebook friends into all online experiences. This vision had an arc that began with integrating Facebook with also-ran phone makers and ended in the failure of the concept, overall. But in between, as The Verge's Casey Newton points out, it gave away more and more data until it overreached with what it called " instant personalization," which customized results in Bing with Facebook data.

The company has been pulling back on this kind of arrangement for years now. It admits in the Times story, however, that the change was not primarily because of privacy concerns. Most of the deals that Facebook cut simply didn't work for either party, despite the data transport going back and forth. As Android and iOS took over from the wider world of mobile phones and computers, Facebook's vision of what it should be evolved. It would no longer be the social spine, but the suite of apps you cannot escape. For years now, the model has been: everything inside Facebook. Apps that threatened that hegemony were purchased (WhatsApp, Instagram) or battled tooth and nail (Twitter, Snapchat).
Read: Another day, another Facebook problem
What's fascinating is that, as with Cambridge Analytica, we're mostly talking about the sins of Facebook past, remnants of a different idea of how the internet was going to work. Except that the Times' reporting indicates that data access for many companies continued long after it should nominally have been cut off. Other companies purported to be surprised that they had the depth of access that they had. The sloppiness-basically up to the present day-remains the most incomprehensible part. For a company that is user data, Facebook sure has made a lot of mistakes spreading it around.

By the looks of it, other tech players have been happy to let Facebook get beaten up while their practices went unexamined. And then, in this one story, the radioactivity of Facebook's data hoard spread basically across the industry. There is a data-industrial complex, and this is what it looked like.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

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dangers of facebook data harvestingfacebook

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Facebook Didn't Sell Your Data; It Gave It Away

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Facebook responded to the story with a long blog post in which the company argued that the data-sharing "work was about helping people" do things on the internet "like seeing recommendations from their Facebook friends-on other popular apps and websites, like Netflix, The New York Times, Pandora, and Spotify."

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Public Shaming online confused as Activism

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Public Shaming online confused as Activism

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This article examines a detrimental effect of digital culture and social media which includes the rise of public shaming which is often confused as activism. Shaming is used online to expose people who do not conform to cultural norms. People tend to believe that they are doing this righteously but actually this shaming has the power to ruin lives, financially, physically and emotionally and does more harm than good.

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There's no denying how digital life has changed the way we live (and behave) today.

Pew Research Center and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center recently canvassed stories from technology experts and scholars about the current and future impact of the Internet.

Experts were concerned about the way people's online activities can undermine truth, foment distrust, jeopardize individuals' well-being when it comes to physical and emotional health, enable trolls to weaken democracy and community, kill privacy, and open up larger social divisions as digital divides widen and more.

These same experts and scholars are quick to remind us of the many positive sides that technology has brought us.

"Digital life is being able to speak and see someone-regardless of where you are-on a phone you carry on your person."

"I can get answers to questions about almost anything just by asking my telephone."

"Digital tools enable people to invent or reinvent their lives and careers. They can also innovate through wide networking with people and information that allows them to develop businesses, find the perfect job, and meet soulmates, colleagues, new friends, and fellow interest-sharers."
The ugly side
With all this power at our fingertips, we have slowly witnessed the corrosion of both online and offline civility among humanity.

Using public shaming to shift our beliefs rather than having constructive conversations has become the new normal. Are we now blurring the lines between activism and [cyber] bullying or humiliation?

Many people remember the public shaming of Justine Sacco or maybe Lindsey Stone that went viral and cost both women years of online reputational damage. People from all walks of life participated in vilifying these women-the majority never meet them or knew them, however with the click of a keypad, were able to ruin their lives.

We shame to pressure outliers to conform to our norms-even if no one can agree anymore what those standards should be.

"I think a lot of people resort to public shaming out of anger and frustration, the desire to call out bad behavior, and the need to feel validated for their emotions," writes Christine Organ in an essay on shaming published on the blog Scary Mommy. "We feel justified in sharing that photo or video, entitled to call out the rude, crass, or inappropriate behavior... We're doing the world a favor, thankyouverymuch."

Of course, shaming in America dates as far back as the days of the Puritans, when those deemed to have crossed their thin moral line were subject to being stoned, scorned, thrown into stocks,
or worse.

Just a generation ago, an embarrassing gaffe might have been written up in the local paper or gossiped about over backyard fences until it was old news. But today is much different. The Internet has eternal life and boundless reach, and victims of a digital disaster must learn to live forever with the implications of that high-tech "tattoo."

As Jennifer Jacquet, an assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University, writes in her book Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool, "The speed at which information can travel, the frequency of anonymous shaming, the size of the audience it can reach, and the permanence of the information separate digital shaming from shaming of the past."

In other words, being the victim of a public shaming has the potential to ruin your life-financially, emotionally, and physically. In the most extreme cases of online harassment, we have seen the worst-case repercussions over and over again: young people taking their own lives and adults losing their livelihoods.
Bullying vs. activism
In a culture of rising incivility, combined with many that are both sensitive and passionate about their beliefs, people are using bullying or harassing behavior and labeling it as activism.

The latest target to experience this is Tess Thompson Talley. Although she's an avid hunter, which many animal rights activists as well as animal lovers may not agree with, it doesn't dismiss her right to her interests and hobbies as long as there is nothing illegal.

Hunting is definitely not for everyone (myself included), however to blatantly mock her and send her death threats on social forums is not activism - this is a form of harassment. In an age of online hate, it's disheartening to watch adults criticize and send digital daggers at each other. These are the same people that are supposed to be the role models for the next generation.

Talley is not alone. In the past couple of months she's had company. BBQ Becky, Permit Patty and Pool Patrol Paula are all nicknames for average people that made public spectacles of themselves forgetting there is always someone ready to aim and shame your most embarrassing moments.
There are no winners
When activism turns into digital or civil warfare, the message will likely get lost and all people will remember is static noise. Change can't and won't happen through this type of behavior.

You may not have heard of the restaurant in Virginia, Red Hen until it made headlines after White House Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave by the owner because they didn't agree with her politics.

It didn't take long for social feeds to light up and publicly shame both Sanders and Red Hen, especially since there was another restaurant in Connecticut with the same name struggling to let people know it wasn't them.

In his recent article, The Ricochet Effect of Public Shaming Now on Full Display, Mitch Albom helps explain how divided people are today and how it contributes to public humiliation.

To use words like "honesty, compassion and cooperation " as reasons to evict someone shows a total lack of, well, honesty, compassion and cooperation.

He continues:

As for "compassion," what compassion are you showing for someone who, for all you know, may struggle with certain elements of her job herself?

Nor is this about "cooperation." It's the opposite of cooperation. It's about your feelings trumping everything else, include decorum, manners or common decency. Sanders didn't murder anyone.

Albom ends his essay by reminding us, it's about us! As we watch people in authority behave inappropriately as well as adults, business owners and others, it's up to us to lead by example.
When in doubt, click out
Being an activist is admirable. You don't have to be a bully-be constructive with your behavior (comments), not combative. There is never a reason to use profanity, mock people or especially wish death to others.

One lasting thought, you are your online presence. Your immediate gratification to insult someone for what you may believe is activism, will be attached to your digital resume forever. Short-term vindication is rarely worth the long-term ramifications. Having a bad day? Give yourself permission to sign-off.

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The Impact of Public Shaming in a Digital World

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There's no denying how digital life has changed the way we live (and behave) today. Pew Research Center and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center recently canvassed stories from technology experts and scholars about the current and future impact of the Internet.

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Digital culture is a toxic environment that brings out the worst in us and gives more power to internet giants. 

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Digital culture is a toxic environment that brings out the worst in us and gives more power to internet giants. 

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Social media is a bummer because everyone want to get attention online which can mean they act nasty or in anyway that will give them attention. Also, everyone is spying on each other. And content is constantly crammed down throat on feeds. SNS spy on you and modify your behaviour. You work for free to make millions for SNS. Also, everyone is fake online.

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It might not seem like it at first, but I'm an optimist. I don't think we have to throw the whole digital world away. But there is one particular hi-tech thing that is toxic even in small quantities.

The issue isn't only that internet users are crammed into environments that can bring out the worst in us, or that so much power has concentrated into a tiny number of hands that control giant cloud computers. A bigger problem is that we are all carrying around devices that are suitable for mass behaviour modification. For example, with old-fashioned advertising, you could measure whether a product did better after an ad was run, but now companies are measuring whether individuals change their behaviours as they browse, and the feeds for each person are constantly tweaked to get the desired result. In short, your behaviour has been turned into a product - and corporate and political clients are lining up to modify it.

Finally, we can draw a circle around the real danger we face. If we could just get rid of the deleterious business model, then the underlying technology might not be so bad.

Some have compared social media to the tobacco industry, but I will not. The better analogy is paint that contains lead. When it became undeniable that lead was harmful, no one declared that houses should never be painted again. Instead, after pressure and legislation, lead-free paints became the new standard.

I speak as a computer scientist, not as a social scientist or psychologist. I can see that time is running out and doing nothing is not an option. We don't have as much in the way of rigorous science as would be ideal for understanding our situation, but we have enough results to describe the problem we must solve, just not a lot of time in which to solve it.

Seems like a good moment to coin an acronym, so how about "Behaviours of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent"? Bummer.

Bummer is a machine, a statistical machine that lives in the computing clouds. Since its influence is statistical, the menace is a little like climate change. You can't say climate change is responsible for a particular storm, flood, or drought, but you can say it changes the odds that they'll happen. In the longer term, the most horrible stuff like sea level rise and the need to relocate most people and find new sources of food would be attributable to climate change, but by then the argument would have been lost.

Similarly, I can't prove that any particular person has been made worse by Bummer, nor can I prove that any particular degradation of our society would not have happened anyway. There's no certain way to know if it has changed your behaviour, but if you use Bummer platforms, you've probably been changed at least a little.

While we can't know what details in our world would be different without Bummer, we can know about the big picture. Like climate change, it will lead us into hell if we don't self-correct.

Bummer is a machine with six moving parts. Here are the six components of the machine and a description of each part...

A is for Attention acquisition

People often get weird and nasty online. This bizarre phenomenon surprised everyone in the earliest days of networking, and it has had a profound effect on our world. Nastiness also turned out to be like crude oil for the social media companies and other behaviour manipulation empires that quickly came to dominate the internet, because it fuelled negative behavioural feedback.

Why does the nastiness happen? In brief: ordinary people are brought together in a setting in which the main - or often the only - reward that's available is attention.

With nothing else to seek but attention, people tend to become assholes, because the biggest ones get the most attention. This inherent bias toward assholedom flavours the action of all the other parts of the Bummer machine.

B is for Butting into everyone's lives

Everyone has been placed under a level of surveillance straight out of a dystopian science fiction novel.

Spying is accomplished mostly through connected personal devices - especially, for now, smartphones - that people keep practically glued to their bodies. Data is gathered about each person's communications, interests, movements, contact with others, emotional reactions to circumstances, facial expressions, purchases, vital signs: an ever-growing, boundless variety of data.

Algorithms correlate data from each person and between people. The correlations are effectively theories about the nature of each person, and those theories are constantly measured and rated for how predictive they are. Like all well-managed theories, they improve through adaptive feedback.

C is for Cramming content down your throat

Algorithms choose what each person experiences through their devices. This component might be called a feed, a recommendation engine, or personalisation. It means each person sees different things. The immediate motivation is to deliver stimuli for individualised behaviour modification.

Not all personalisation is part of Bummer. When Netflix recommends a movie or eBay recommends something to buy, it isn't Bummer. It only becomes Bummer in connection with other components. Neither Netflix nor eBay is being paid by third parties to influence your behaviour apart from the immediate business you do with each site.

D is for Directing behaviours in the sneakiest way possible

The above elements are connected to create a measurement and feedback machine that deliberately modifies behaviour. The process runs thus: customised feeds become optimised to "engage" each user, often with emotionally potent cues, leading to addiction. People don't realise how they are being manipulated. The default purpose of manipulation is to get people more and more glued in, and to get them to spend more and more time in the system. But other purposes for manipulation are also tested.

For instance, if you're reading on a device, your reading behaviours will be correlated with those of multitudes of other people. If someone who has a reading pattern similar to yours bought something after it was pitched in a particular way, then the odds become higher that you will get the same pitch. You might be targeted before an election with weird posts that have been proven to bring out the inner cynic in people who are similar to you, in order to reduce the chances that you'll vote.

Bummer platforms have proudly reported on experimenting with making people sad, changing voter turnout, and reinforcing brand loyalty. Indeed, these are some of the best-known examples of research that were revealed in the formative days of Bummer. The digital network approach to behaviour modification flattens all these examples, all these different slices of life, into one slice. From the point of view of the algorithm, emotions, happiness, and brand loyalty are just different, but similar, signals to optimise.

E is for Earning money from letting the worst people secretly screw with everyone else

The mass behaviour modification machine is rented out to make money. The manipulations are not perfect, but they are powerful enough that it becomes suicidal for brands, politicians, and other competitive entities to forgo payments to Bummer enterprises. Universal cognitive blackmail ensues, resulting in a rising global spend on Bummer.

If someone isn't paying a platform in cash, then they must turn themselves into data-fuel for that platform in order to not be overwhelmed by it. When Facebook emphasised "news" in its feed, the entire world of journalism had to reformulate itself to Bummer standards. To avoid being left out, journalists had to create stories that emphasised clickbait and were detachable from context. They were forced to become Bummer in order to not be annihilated by it.

F is for Fake mobs and faker society

This component is almost always present, even though it typically wasn't part of the initial design of a Bummer machine. Fake people are present in unknown but vast numbers and establish the ambience. Bots, AIs, agents, fake reviewers, fake friends, fake followers, fake posters, automated catfishers: a menagerie of wraiths.

Invisible social vandalism ensues. Social pressure, which is so influential in human psychology and behaviour, is synthesised.

The more specifically we can draw a line around a problem, the more solvable that problem becomes. Our problem is not the internet, smartphones, smart speakers, or the art of algorithms; the problem is the Bummer machine. And the core of the machine is not a technology, exactly, but a style of business plan that spews out perverse incentives and corrupts people.

It's not even a widely used business plan. Outside of China, the only tech giants that fully depend on this system are Facebook and Google. The other three of the big five tech companies indulge occasionally, because it is normalised these days, but they don't depend on it. A few smaller Bummer companies are also influential, like Twitter, though they often struggle.

Which companies are Bummer? A good way to tell is that first-rank Bummer companies are the ones that attract efforts or spending from bad actors, such as Russian state intelligence warfare units. This test reveals that there are pseudo-services that contain only subsets of the components, like Reddit and 4chan, but still play significant roles in the Bummer ecosystem.

But this argument is not about corporations, it's about you. Because we can draw a line around the machine, we can draw a line around what to avoid.

The problem with Bummer is not that it includes any particular technology, but that it's someone else's power trip. You might choose to be treated by a cognitive behavioural therapist, and benefit from it. Hopefully that therapist will have sworn an oath to uphold professional standards and will earn your trust. If, however, your therapist is beholden to a giant, remote corporation and is being paid to get you to make certain decisions that aren't necessarily in your own interests, then that would be a Bummer.

The problem isn't any particular technology, but the use of technology to manipulate people, to concentrate power in a way that is so nuts and creepy that it becomes a threat to the survival of civilisation.

If you want to help make the world sane, you don't need to give up your smartphone, using computer cloud services, or visiting websites. Bummer is the stuff to avoid. Delete your accounts!
This is an edited extract from Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier (Bodley Head, £9.99). To order it for £8.49 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846 Topics

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Six reasons why social media is a Bummer

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It might not seem like it at first, but I'm an optimist. I don't think we have to throw the whole digital world away. But there is one particular hi-tech thing that is toxic even in small quantities.

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Pictures are not always as happy as they seem

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Pictures are not always as happy as they seem

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This article examines the phenomena whereby the more miserable people are the happier-appearing pictures they post. Social media posts which portray happy or interesting events can induce envy in onlookers, however, a twitter thread found that pictures being posted were not always as happy as they seemed. The people who participated in the thread gave examples of what was happening behind the scenes in the seemingly joyous pictures they posted, such as couples fighting, depression, and racism.

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This article examines many people’s different experiences of social media and the new culture of documenting our lives online. She explores the impact of social media on mental health, speaking to young people who have chosen to take their self-off of social media. People gave accounts of feeling more free, sometimes FOMO but generally being relieved of stress.

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Here's What Your Life Would Be Like Without Social Media

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If social media has grown to be a massive part of our lives, then why are so many quitting it?

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This article asks, is social media making you miserable? It references many studies which included findings on social media causing stress, anxiety, and negative emotions at what they saw online. There were mixed results overall but the takeaway message was taking time away from social media can generally improve mood more than make it worst.

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You Asked: Is Social Media Making Me Miserable?

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Spending too much time on social media, like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, is a problem. But "too much" varies from person to person.

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Social media mobs are often more damaging than the person being attacked for saying the wrong thing. 

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Social media mobs are often more damaging than the person being attacked for saying the wrong thing. 

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Social media mobs are more harmful than the person who is being shamed. For example, Justine Saccoo had her life ruined and the internet cheered. There are impossible standards on the internet, some people make bad jokes or say offensive things and are completely swarmed by an online mob who change their life forever. It’s impossible to be completely wise and all knowing the minute you are born, but now that online lives are increasingly common, this is the expectation.

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Back in 2013, Justine Sacco was getting ready to visit her family in South Africa, and before she boarded her flight, she made an insensitive joke on Twitter: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!" By the time her flight was over, she had become the world's leading trending topic, with millions of people berating her for her racism, calling for her firing, and calling her terrible names. She was fired, and the internet cheered.

2018 has seen dozens of similar situations. A person (ranging from nobody to celebrity) commits an unacceptable action (ranging from an ill-considered joke to an actual crime), and a mob of angry users rushes together in an attempt to ruin that person's life. Quinn Norton, an expert in hacker culture, was fired almost immediately after being hired by the New York Times in February, after it was revealed that her past tweets included terms offensive to gay people.

Something similar happened to Kevin Williamson after being hired by The Atlantic, when the Twitter mob discovered he once wrote that women who had abortions should be considered murderers. Then there was "Permit Patty," who resigned as CEO of a cannabis company after being accused of racism when she called the police on a girl selling water in front of an office building. And of course, there was Roseanne Barr, a sitcom star who tweeted about Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, comparing her looks to an ape. After the outrage on Twitter, her show, Roseanne, was canceled.

There are dozens, if not hundreds of examples here, with some involving more serious and violent issues, like sexual assault. More recently, the New York Times made headlines again when it refused to fire tech journalist Sarah Jeong after her past tweets about hating white people resurfaced. Some publications hailed this as the right move, indicating that these tweets had been weaponized against Jeong by the alt-right.

I believe that the New York Times made the right decision by refusing to cave into the hate-filled rants and so-called outrage of social media users. But here's the thing: this isn't a manipulative tactic of the alt-right, or any political party. This isn't about using mobs to push a political agenda. It's about the state of our society, the nature of social media, and the momentum of seeing results when demanding justice (regardless of whether or not it's deserved).

It's bad for our society, and it needs to be stopped.

Ruining a life

Very few of the above examples can be said to have done real damage to an individual, yet some of the people who committed these actions and said these things have had their lives effectively ruined. A quick Google search for their name unearths hundreds of articles denouncing them for a single bad decision, making it hard for them to find work in the future.

It can strain relationships, and in some cases, incentivize actual violence against them-it's not hard to imagine such a crime unfolding when dozens, if not hundreds of people call for someone's death.

Missing the full story

In the vast majority of cases, the people calling for someone's firing or punishment don't have the full story. They've seen a single tweet, without any context, or they've seen a video covering the last 30 seconds of an interaction that lasted several minutes or longer.

We can't allow any kind of justice system to make a final call based on these limited pieces of information-that's why we have an actual justice system in place. No matter how flawed that justice system is, it strives to guarantee people the right to a fair and impartial trial. There's nothing fair or impartial about a swarm of Twitter users cherry-picking the worst in people, and using that as an excuse to launch a full-blown assault against them.

Impossible standards

Many of these incidents involve bad actions-insensitive jokes, aggressive behaviors, or outright racist stupidity. But we can't expect people to be perfect 100 percent of the time. Imagine if you were judged for everything you've ever done or said; chances are, even the most nonjudgmental, charitable, and kind of us has a handful of statements that would qualify us for our own internet lynch mob.

Consider the case of director James Gunn, who was fired from Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 earlier this year when a series of his offensive tweets resurfaced. The tweets themselves are pretty horrible, but they were also made in 2009-and Gunn has had nothing but support from friends, family, and the cast of his movies, publicly stating that he's grown as a person.

What if you could lose your job over a dumb mistake you made 9 years ago? And not a hit-and-run accident or a murder charge, but a tasteless joke you made on the internet. That's the reality of the impossible standards we set for people.

The ease of building momentum

Another problem here is that there's no obstacle to building the momentum necessary to screw up someone's life (in some cases permanently). On Twitter, it takes less than a minute to retweet an offensive message with a short message shaming the person who wrote it. If you have access to thousands of followers, you can mobilize a small army of vocal warriors to help bring someone down.

On top of that, there's often little to no verification in place for individual users; millions of accounts are entirely anonymous, allowing people to relentlessly call for someone's firing, resignation, or punishment, without any repercussions for their own life. In a matter of hours, a tweet that was meant to be seen by a few dozen people can reach millions, and all it takes is a few seconds of effort by each passive reader of that tweet.

The slippery slope

We're in especially dangerous territory here because of how many instances of Twitter justice we've already seen. Millions of people have already participated in a Twitter-based hate-fest that resulted in measurable action; they saw Justine Sacco get fired, they saw Permit Patty resign, and they saw Roseanne get canceled.

They're gratified by it, and I can't even blame them-it's satisfying to see someone say or do something insensitive, then get their comeuppance. But the more we feed into that machine, and the more gratification we give to people, the more they're going to participate in this brand of justice in the future. That's why the New York Times taking a stand against firing Sarah Jeong wasn't just an anti-alt-right move-it was a step in the right direction.

We're entering a world where more of our lives and actions are being not only monitored, but closely inspected, and it's only a matter of time before we're all judged under similar scrutiny. I hope for your sake, as well as mine, that we're able to find a more peaceful way to express criticism and discontent for the actions of our fellow people-and that the institutions of the world grow enough of a backbone to stand up against internet hate mobs.

Read next: Apple's 2018 MacBooks come a chip that protects against eavesdropping

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Social media mobs are worse for society than the people they shame

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Back in 2013, Justine Sacco was getting ready to visit her family in South Africa, and before she boarded her flight, she made an insensitive joke on Twitter: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!" By the time her flight was over, she had become the world's leading trending topic, ...

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SNS are an advertisement platform before anything else. 

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SNS are an advertisement platform before anything else. 

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When liking everything you see online you generate more data about yourself and therefore are bombarded with more advertisements than content from actual friends. This shows Facebook as an advertising company.

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There's this great Andy Warhol quote you've probably seen before: "I think everybody should like everybody." You can buy posters and plates with pictures of Warhol, looking like the cover of a Belle & Sebastian album, with that phrase plastered across his face in Helvetica. But the full quote, taken from a 1963 interview in Art News, is a great description of how we interact on social media today.

Warhol: Someone said that Brecht wanted everybody to think alike. I want everybody to think alike. But Brecht wanted to do it through Communism, in a way. Russia is doing it under government. It's happening here all by itself without being under a strict government; so if it's working without trying, why can't it work without being Communist? Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we're getting more and more that way.
I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should like everybody.
Art News: Is that what Pop Art is all about?
Warhol: Yes. It's liking things.
Art News: And liking things is like being a machine?
Warhol: Yes, because you do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again.

The like and the favorite are the new metrics of success-very literally. Not only are they ego-feeders for the stuff we put online as individuals, but advertisers track their campaigns on Facebook by how often they are liked. A recent New York Times story on a krill oil ad campaign lays bare how much the like matters to advertisers. Liking is an economic act.

I like everything. Or at least I did, for 48 hours. Literally everything Facebook sent my way, I liked-even if I hated it. I decided to embark on a campaign of conscious liking, to see how it would affect what Facebook showed me. I know this sounds like a stunt (and it was) but it was also genuinely just an open-ended experiment. I wasn't sure how long I'd keep it up (48 hours was all I could stand) or what I'd learn (possibly nothing.)

See, Facebook uses algorithms to decide what shows up in your feed. It isn't just a parade of sequential updates from your friends and the things you've expressed an interest in. In 2014 the News Feed is a highly-curated presentation, delivered to you by a complicated formula based on the actions you take on the site, and across the web. I wanted to see how my Facebook experience would change if I constantly rewarded the robots making these decisions for me, if I continually said, "good job, robot, I like this." I also decided I'd only do this on Facebook itself-trying to hit every Like button I came across on the open web would just be too daunting. But even when I kept the experiment to the site itself, the results were dramatic.

>There is a very specific form of Facebook messaging, designed to get you to interact. And if you take the bait, you'll be shown it ad nauseam.

The first thing I liked was Living Social-my friend Jay had liked it before me and it was sitting at the top of my feed. I liked two more updates from friends. So far, so good. But the fourth thing I encountered was something I didn't really like. I mean, I don't truly like Living Social either, whatever the hell that is, but who cares. But this fourth thing was something I sort of actively disliked. A bad joke-or at least a dumb one. Oh well. I liked it anyway.

One thing I had to decide right away was what to do about the related items that appear after you've liked something. Let's say you like a story about cows that you see on Modern Farmer. Facebook will immediately present you with four more options to like things below that cow story, "relateds" in Facebook parlance. Probably more stories about cows or agriculture.

Relateds quickly became a problem, because as soon as you like one, Facebook replaces it with another. So as soon as I liked the four relateds below a story, it immediately gave me four more. And then four more. And then four more. And then four more. I quickly realized I'd be stuck in a related loop for eternity if I kept this up. So I settled on a new rule: I would like the first four relateds Facebook shows me, but no more.

Sometimes, liking is counterintuitive. My friend Hillary posted a picture of her toddler Pearl, with bruises on her face. It was titled "Pearl vs. the concrete." I didn't like it at all! It was sad. Normally, it would be the kind of News Feed item that would compel me to leave a comment, instead of hitting the little thumbs up button. Oh well. Like. The only time I declined to like something was when a friend posted about the death of a relative. I just had a death in my family last week. It was a bridge I wasn't going to cross.

But there was still plenty more to like. I liked one of my cousin's updates, which he had re-shared from Joe Kennedy, and was subsequently beseiged with Kennedys to like (plus a Clinton and a Shriver). I liked Hootsuite. I liked The New York Times, I liked Coupon Clipinista. I liked something from a friend I haven't spoken to in 20 years-something about her kid, camp and a snake. I liked Amazon. I liked fucking Kohl's. I liked Kohl's for you.

My News Feed took on an entirely new character in a surprisingly short amount of time. After checking in and liking a bunch of stuff over the course of an hour, there were no human beings in my feed anymore. It became about brands and messaging, rather than humans with messages.

Likewise, content mills rose to the top. Nearly my entire feed was given over to Upworthy and the Huffington Post. As I went to bed that first night and scrolled through my News Feed, the updates I saw were (in order): Huffington Post, Upworthy, Huffington Post, Upworthy, a Levi's ad, Space.com, Huffington Post, Upworthy, The Verge, Huffington Post, Space.com, Upworthy, Space.com.

Also, as I went to bed, I remember thinking "Ah, crap. I have to like something about Gaza," as I hit the Like button on a post with a pro-Israel message.

By the next morning, the items in my News Feed had moved very, very far to the right. I'm offered the chance to like the 2nd Amendment and some sort of anti-immigrant page. I like them both. I like Ted Cruz. I like Rick Perry. The Conservative Tribune comes up again, and again, and again in my News Feed. I get to learn its very particular syntax. Usually it went something like this:

A sentence recounting some controversial news. Good!

A sentence explaining why this is good.

A call to action, often ending with a question?

Once I see this pattern, I start noticing it everywhere. SF Gate, the San Francisco Chronicle's web presence, uses a similar tactic. It is a very specific form of Facebook messaging, designed to get you to interact. And if you take the bait, you'll be shown it ad nauseam.

I was also struck by how different my feeds were on mobile and the desktop, even when viewed at the same time. By the end of day one, I noticed that on mobile, my feed was almost completely devoid of human content. I was only presented with the chance to like stories from various websites, and various other ads. Yet on the desktop-while it's still mostly branded content-I continue to see things from my friends. On that little bitty screen, where real-estate is so valuable, Facebook's robots decided that the way to keep my attention is by hiding the people and only showing me the stuff that other machines have pumped out. Weird.

As day one rolled into day two, I began dreading going to Facebook. It had become a temple of provocation. Just as my News Feed had drifted further and further right, so too did it drift further and further left. Rachel Maddow, Raw Story, Mother Jones, Daily Kos and all sort of other leftie stuff was interspersed with items that are so far to the right I'm nearly afraid to like them for fear of ending up on some sort of watch list.

>Stop what you're doing and look at this baby that looks exactly like Jay-Z.

This is a problem much bigger than Facebook. It reminded me of what can go wrong in society, and why we now often talk at each other instead of to each other. We set up our political and social filter bubbles and they reinforce themselves-the things we read and watch have become hyper-niche and cater to our specific interests. We go down rabbit holes of special interests until we're lost in the queen's garden, cursing everyone above ground.

But maybe worse than the fractious political tones my feed took on was how deeply stupid it became. I'm given the chance to like a Buzzfeed post of some guy dancing, and another that asks Which Titanic Character Are You? A third Buzzfeed post informs me that "Katy Perry's Backup Dancer is the Mancandy You Deserve." According to New York magazine, I am "officially old" because Malia Obama went to Lollapalooza (like!) and CNN tells me "Husband Explores His Man-ternal Instincts" alongside a photo of a shirtless man cupping his nipples. A cloud that looks like a penis. Stop what you're doing and look at this baby that looks exactly like Jay-Z. My feed was showing almost only the worst kind of tripe that all of us in the media are complicit in churning out yet should also be deeply ashamed of. Sensational garbage. I liked it all.

While I expected that what I saw might change, what I never expected was the impact my behavior would have on my friends' feeds. I kept thinking Facebook would rate-limit me, but instead it grew increasingly ravenous. My feed become a cavalcade of brands and politics and as I interacted with them, Facebook dutifully reported this to all my friends and followers.

That first night, a small little circle with a dog's head popped up in the corner of my phone. A chat head, from Facebook's Messenger software! The dog turned out to be my old WIRED editor, John Bradley. "Have you been hacked," he wanted to know. The next morning, my friend Helena sent me a message. "My fb feed is literally full of articles you like, it's kind of funny," she says. "No friend stuff, just Honan likes." I replied with a thumbs up. This continued throughout the experiment. When I posted a status update to Facebook just saying "I like you," I heard from numerous people that my weirdo activity had been overrunning their feeds. "My newsfeed is 70 percent things Mat has liked," noted my pal Heather. Eventually, I would hear from someone who worked at Facebook, who had noticed my activity and wanted to connect me with the company's PR department.

But I'd already put a stop to it by then anyway, because it was just too awful. I tried counting how much stuff I'd liked by looking in my activity log, but it was too overwhelming. I'd added more than a thousand things to my Likes page-most of which were loathsome or at best banal. By liking everything, I turned Facebook into a place where there was nothing I liked. To be honest, I really didn't like it. I didn't like what I had done.

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I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days. Here's What It Did to Me

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There's this great Andy Warhol quote you've probably seen before: "I think everybody should like everybody." You can buy posters and plates with pictures of Warhol, looking like the cover of a Belle & Sebastian album, with that phrase plastered across his face in Helvetica.

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Instagram is not as friendly as it appears

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Instagram is not as friendly as it appears

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This article questions the so-called positivity of Instagram. Unlike other social networking sites, Instagram’s only function is to post photos and like other people’s photos. However, this can be harmful in itself because the photos which are posted often portray life in idealised ways which leaves consumers comparing their reality to the so-called reality they see online.

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When 24-year-old fashion blogger Scarlett Dixon posted a picture of herself having breakfast, the internet turned nasty. "The best of days start with a smile and positive thoughts. And pancakes. And strawberries. And bottomless tea," Dixon wrote on her scarlettlondon Instagram feed, under an image of her looking flawless on a freshly made bed flanked by heart-shaped helium balloons.

The sponsored post - for Listerine mouthwash, a bottle of which is visible on the side of the shot - was swiftly reposted on Twitter. "Fuck off this is anybody's normal morning," wrote Nathan from Cardiff. "Instagram is a ridiculous lie factory made to make us all feel inadequate." His post, which has garnered more than 111,000 likes (22 times as many as Dixon's original) and almost 25,000 retweets, prompted a wave of criticism, with the more printable comments ranging from "Fakelife!" and "Bunny-boiler" to "Let's pop her balloons" and "Who keeps Listerine on their bedside table? Serial killers, that's who."

View this post on Instagram

The best of days start with a smile and positive thoughts. And pancakes. And strawberries. And bottomless tea. My morning routine is now live on YouTube - and while I don't show you my real bed hair (trust me, it's not pretty), I do give you a little insight into how I start my day in a positive way. Head over to my stories for a swipe up link - and let me know what you think! It features my morning habit of rinsing with Listerine Advanced White to help whiten my teeth. @listerineukireland #BringOutTheBold | This is a paid partnership with Listerine.

A post shared by Scarlett London (@scarlettlondon) on

That hostility feels par for the course on Twitter. The social network is a notorious hotbed of abusive strangers hurling abuse at other abusive strangers, who then all occasionally come together to bully a celebrity off the internet over some minor failing, such as being a woman in a Star Wars film. Instagram, by contrast, looks like the friendliest social network imaginable. It's a visually led community where the primary method of interaction is double-tapping an image to like it, where posts that go viral tend to do so because of positivity rather than outrage and where many of the biggest accounts are famous dogs and cats. What's not to like?

But, for a growing number of users - and mental health experts - the very positivity of Instagram is precisely the problem. The site encourages its users to present an upbeat, attractive image that others may find at best misleading and at worse harmful. If Facebook demonstrates that everyone is boring and Twitter proves that everyone is awful, Instagram makes you worry that everyone is perfect - except you.

In the days following her initial Instagram post, Dixon pointed out the irony that this fear - that the unreality of social media is harming people - was itself being used to justify the thousands attacking her.

"Each time I refresh my page, hundreds of new nasty messages pour on to my Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, some of which have contained malicious death threats," she wrote in a f ollow-up Instagram post, accompanying a picture of her in Venice with an ice-cream. "There are now hundreds of thousands of tweets circling the internet, shaming me."

"My feed isn't a place of reality," Dixon added. "I mean who spends their time in such a beautiful city, perched on a ledge, ice-cream in hand and smile permanently affixed to her face? It's staged, guys.

"I personally don't think my content is harmful to young girls, but I do agree Instagram can present a false expectation for people to live up to."

But whether or not Dixon's feed is harmful, there is growing support for the idea that Instagram isn't great for its users' mental health.

In 2017, the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH), an independent charity that seeks to improve people's wellbeing, conducted a UK-wide survey of 14- to 24-year-olds, asking them about the big five social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram. Users ranked how their use of the platforms affected everything from the quality of their sleep to their Fomo - the fear of missing out on what others are enjoying.

Instagram came last, scoring particularly badly for its effects on sleep, body image and Fomo. Only Snapchat came close in its overall negativity, saved by a more positive effect on real-world relationships, while YouTube scored positively on almost every metric - except its effect on sleep, for which it was the worst of all the platforms.

"On the face of it, Instagram can look very friendly," says the RSPH's Niamh McDade. "But that endless scrolling without much interaction doesn't really lead to much of a positive impact on mental health and wellbeing. You also don't really have control over what you're seeing. And you quite often see images that claim to be showing you reality, yet aren't. That's especially damaging to young men and women."

The risk of developing an unhealthy body image is often highlighted, but McDade emphasises that this is just one aspect. "Some people may be looking at feeds full of cars, and it's giving them anxiety and depression as they can't afford them."

For Stephen, a 24-year-old from London, the unreality led him to develop unhealthy behaviours online. "I was going through a bit of heartbreak at the time," he says, "and any experience of seeing my ex's name on Instagram killed me. I was pretty down and found myself predominantly using Instagram to either 'punish' myself by looking at my ex, or using the browse feature to distract me. I found myself looking at attractive women a lot when they'd come up in the browse feature, which would then cause more to be shown.

"I was getting to a point where I was feeding an unhealthy habit [of forming a warped view of women] and making myself feel worse." Stephen then took a year-long break from the app, during which he wrote a dissertation on its harmful effects on wellbeing and body satisfaction.

"The problem with Instagram is that you, almost exclusively, share content that is meant to reflect positively on yourself," he says. "On Twitter or Facebook, you see much more content that isn't, 'Hey, look at my great life.'"

Almost every user adds fuel to the flames. Even as we're being made miserable by the unreal lives that we follow, we share an unreal version of our own lives. "I have been on Instagram since 2013 and in the beginning I enjoyed it," says Adnan, a 25-year-old Syrian who lives in Cape Town. "But, as the years passed, it changed from being a friendly environment, where most people posted food pictures, into a competitive social platform where everyone filters out their lives to represent a life that does not exist. Nobody looks good all the time, nobody is always happy. When things get tough, I get really upset when I see other people having the 'perfect' life." And yet, Adnan says, "I am also guilty of trying to show the best side of my life to people."

But Instagram has always been about looking flawless. What has changed to spark such a backlash? Among users I spoke to, one event was cited time and again: the introduction, in mid-2016, of Instagram's algorithmic timeline. It was one of the largest changes to the platform since it was bought by Facebook in 2012. Rather than presenting users with a cross-section of what the people they were following were up to at any given moment, Instagram began populating feeds with the most noteworthy posts from those accounts, often reaching back days or even weeks to pull in particularly compelling content. In effect, the service began promoting a curated, unrealistic version of an already curated, unrealistic feed.

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'You often see images that claim to be showing you reality, yet aren't.' Photograph: Getty Images

Talya Stone, a parenting blogger at Motherhood: The Real Deal, went cool on Instagram shortly afterwards. "For a long time, Instagram was one of the only places where the interaction felt real," she says. "Then the algorithm came along and blew that out of the water. The whole point of these social platforms is that they are supposed to enhance social connectivity - yet, bizarrely, they are based on an algorithm that seems to be working against this very notion."

Victoria Hui, who runs the lifestyle blog the Lust Listt, says there is another issue affecting "pro" Instagram users - those who make a living (or hope to) from advertising and sponsorship. "The new algorithm creates a popularity contest between creators, so that they resort to unethical business decisions in order to keep themselves at the top of the food chain."

Unscrupulous creators started buying followers, likes and comments in an attempt to fool the algorithm; as Instagram clamped down on that, Hui says, those users formed secret "comment pods" conspiring to share "each and every post with each other in order to generate 'authentic' and immediate engagement".

While influencers such as Dixon often get the lion's share of the blame for the epidemic of unreality on Instagram, it's just as prevalent at the grassroots as it is among the "Insta-celebrities".

I stopped using the app earlier this year, when I realised that I reliably felt worse after opening it than I did before I started. But my Instagram - a locked account, with just a couple of hundred followers and posts - is almost exclusively for keeping in touch with people I got to know in other ways. The closest I get to following influencers is the pop star Carly Rae Jepsen and an Instagram-famous husky.

Still, every time I open the app, I'm presented with an endless feed of my friends and family doing incredible things, having a wonderful time, without me.

There's the friend whose wedding I wasn't invited to; I found out about it through the app. There's the friend who is looking fantastic after every workout and lets us all know. And there's the friend who lives in New York, apparently over in London for the weekend without telling me.

Meanwhile, I'm doing nothing of note - except sitting on Instagram. At least I don't suffer the same from the adverts. Because of a glitch in my privacy settings, Instagram believes I am a Bangkok teenager and serves me nothing but adverts written in Thai for acne cures and KFC. This is not a joke.

When I tell friends about my dissatisfaction with the app, their responses are mixed. Some cite conventional wisdom, telling me to unfollow the influencers with a commercial imperative to sell me a perfect life and devote the app to keeping up with the friends I care about. Rob, for instance, follows "fewer than 100 people, all family and friends".

But I don't follow any influencers, and the friends I care about most are the ones most likely to create that familiar pang of Fomo.

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'Every time I open the app, I'm presented with an endless feed of my friends and family doing incredible things' Photograph: Thomas Barwick/Getty Images

Others offer exactly the opposite advice, arguing that my problem is not following enough influencers. I should focus less on using Instagram to find out what people I care about are doing and more on using it as a source of information and inspiration. One friend, Lynsey, cites Present and Correct, which sells exquisitely designed office supplies, as her go-to happy place. Another, Marie, recommends her personal mix of "roughly one-third friends, one-third MPs and one-third drag queens".

It's true that there is a whole world of information best communicated in a visual medium. While some fitness-focused Instagrams leave you feeling like a fat blob of plasticine, others are sources of useful advice, laser-targeted at people in your situation.

But I've tried that version of Instagram, too, and I worry that it provides only a veneer of engagement, while forever hovering on the precipice of impossibly perfect breakfasts eaten by impossibly perfect people. Even Facebook, Instagram's owner, warns against using its products in this way. "In general," the company wrote on its corporate blog last year, "when people spend a lot of time passively consuming information - reading but not interacting with people - they report feeling worse afterward".

Of course, Facebook's answer was that everyone should post more. But it would say that, wouldn't it? Another option is to follow the guidance of the RSPH. As part of " scroll-free September " the charity is encouraging users to aim for anything between complete cold turkey and simply stopping at certain times, such as in the bedroom or during meals.

There is one final possibility, proposed by a few others when I shared my own Insta-woes: don't give up on Instagram, just give up on people.

There are enough dogs, cats, birds, otters and ferrets to fill a social network of their own - from Jiro the otter to Gotcha the cockatoo - and it's very hard to scroll through pet Instagram and feel bad about yourself.

Though you may start wishing for a more photogenic labradoodle.
For more information and advice on issues with social media, go to the RSPH: rsph.org.uk Topics

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Instagram is supposed to be friendly. So why is it making people so miserable?

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When 24-year-old fashion blogger Scarlett Dixon posted a picture of herself having breakfast, the internet turned nasty. "The best of days start with a smile and positive thoughts. And pancakes. And strawberries. And bottomless tea," Dixon wrote on her scarlettlondon Instagram feed, under an image of her looking flawless on a freshly made bed flanked by heart-shaped helium balloons.

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This is an example of an artifical intelligence having the power to decide which bodies should be posted and which are the right type of body. Similar to things which get blocked on instagram.

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Lizzo has accused the social media app TikTok of body shaming after it deleted multiple videos of her in a bathing suit.

"TikTok keeps taking down my videos with me in my bathing suits," she wrote in the clip she posted on TikTok. "But allows other videos with girls in bathing suits. I wonder why? TikTok ... we need to talk." The clip has received over 8m views on TikTok.

A TikTok spokesperson told the Guardian that Lizzo's videos were not removed because she was wearing a bathing suit. They cited other violations, including "sexual gratification", that lead to a moderator initially banning the videos. The spokesperson specifically cited one video that featured Lizzo lifting up her dress to reveal her undergarments. There was initial confusion over what the garments were. After officials at TikTok spoke to Lizzo's team, and the undergarments were confirmed to be Spanx, not underwear, the videos were reinstated exactly as they were originally uploaded. "We love Lizzo's creativity," the spokesperson said. "And the videos were originally removed because of other violations, not a bathing suit."

The Juice singer has worked hard to combat negative comments and attitudes towards her physical appearance. Last year, Lizzo received a flurry of attacks for wearing an ass-less dress and thong to an NBA game. "Never ever let somebody stop you or shame you from being yourself," she said in response to the attacks. "This is who I've always been. Now everyone's looking at it, and your criticism can just remain your criticism. Your criticism has no effect on me."
Lizzo: lack of body positivity in media took toll on mental health
Lizzo also shrugged off the controversial comments fitness expert Jillian Michaels made on the body-positivity movement surrounding the singer. ("Why are we celebrating her body? Why does it matter? Why aren't we celebrating her music? 'Cause it isn't gonna be awesome if she gets diabetes." Michaels said during a morning news segment.)

TikTok is not the first social media platform Lizzo has taken issue with. Last year, she quit Twitter due to severe bullying and online trolls.

TikTok has come under fire before for its censorship of users' content. In November, Washington DC officials held hearings over the app censoring political content. And last year, officials at TikTok admitted to censoring offensive content in an effort to curb bullying towards users who are fat, disabled, LGBTQ+, and/or people of color.

Social media platforms have long faced accusations of unfairly censoring women's bodies, with many women's rights groups calling the decisions sexist. Instagram has come under fire for heavily deleting photos that feature women's nipples. The Free the Nipple movement rages on the app - multiple artists and celebrities, including Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, and Chrissy Teigen have challenged the censorship rule with their own buzzed-about, scandalous photos. In 2015, Milk and Honey poet Rupi Kaur gained notoriety for challenging Instagram's ban on period blood by posting her own.
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'TikTok we need to talk': Lizzo slams social media app for body shaming

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Lizzo has accused the social media app TikTok of body shaming after it deleted multiple videos of her in a bathing suit. "TikTok keeps taking down my videos with me in my bathing suits," she wrote in the clip she posted on TikTok. "But allows other videos with girls in bathing suits.

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Protest for rights through deleting facebook

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Protest for rights through deleting facebook

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This article encourages deleting Facebook in order to beat the addiction of social media. This was also exploring a way to boycott Facebook after they were found to foster addiction and modify behaviour. This addresses the pay-offs involved in prosumption of signing up to a free account and simultaneously being experimented on.

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When I wrote an about-to-be-published book last year about problems with social media, I thought it would be cute to call it Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. And then the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, motivating a modest but notable wave of Facebook deletions in protest, including by prominent tech figures such as Elon Musk and Brian Acton, the co-founder of WhatsApp.

So much for the novelty of my book title. The biggest surprise was not the movement to delete accounts, but that the deleters have not been received well by pundits and commentators. The response has often been smug, dismissive, even scolding. Deleters are told they are abusing their privilege; that they are leaving behind the less fortunate, who cannot afford to quit. They are said to be abandoning society or distracting from the more important process of petitioning governments to regulate Facebook. They are accused of tilting at windmills.

But these deleters are indispensable. They should be celebrated. We all benefit from them.

The primary value of a boycott in this case is not mere protest to damage Facebook, but to invent what life can be like today without the social network.

A deleter must reconsider how she holds her social life together. She will therefore rethink what a social life is.

Is having a publicly broadcast number of associates a good thing, or does it foster a meaningless sense of social competition? Does Facebook's method, which combines user tracking with stimuli calculated to foster addiction and behaviour modification, really reveal the most beneficial options for her? Does an experiential feed constructed by algorithms serve her, or other people who are paying to modify her behaviour? Are the components of the Facebook experience severable or not? Can you have a modern social and professional life without the manipulation? Is it even conceivable? Who will ask? Who will find out? The deleters will!

To suggest that everyone stays in line with the current regime is to cement Facebook's role as sole designer of a key aspect of the digital future.

Before Facebook, there were ways to do most of the things that Facebook allows, and there still are. There are other ways to keep up with friends, be informed, discover local events, announce your own life events, publish opinions, meet new people, and so on.

While it is pervasive, Facebook has not brought as much into the world as it may seem. Facebook excels at applying addictive design techniques (according to figures such as its former president Sean Parker) more than it does in innovating value that the internet can offer.

I have no social media accounts at all, and yet I am able to maintain a career. It's possible that Facebook's highly crafted addictive quality is fostering the illusion that there's gravity where there isn't. If you let go, you might find that you've lost nothing.

My case is not ideally instructive because I never had social media accounts. But those who have had accounts and then deleted them are true pioneers. They will see things and learn things that are new in the world.

Quitting Facebook is a significant project, just like overcoming any addiction. The company does what it can to make the process difficult and uncertain. It also hoards data and fine-tunes options, which make it hard for people to control what happens with their data, much less leave. The site benefits from network effect, since so many people are on it.

Those who have gone through the exiting process, however, might find that in the end they have not only made a political statement, but saved time and improved their lives.

Since Facebook is designed to take up as much attention as possible, those who find alternate ways to gain the benefits of Facebook will often discover they have more free time. For instance, experimenters have reported that reading news sites directly makes one not only better informed, but less ragged with weird partisan noise, and in possession of an "embarrassing" amount of free time, according to one account.

Part of the reason Facebook has achieved a monopoly is that dealing with diverse digital services is such a tedious pain. It's stunning how much time we spend carefully entering long strings of letters and numbers into machines. Facebook provides a single account that can attach to many other services. That might be its greatest unique practical value. Even so, everyone I have talked to who has gone to the trouble to fully leave Facebook has found that in the end time was gained.

Ultimately, Facebook deleters should not think of themselves as protesters so much as innovators. If we are to create a survivable digital society, it must be invented and that invention is unlikely to flow from a single company. We cannot create a hi-tech digital civilisation by continuing to complain to Facebook about its counterproductive design. We cannot have regulators trim a beast as if they were barbers and call that change. The act of invention must be distributed.

We must learn to be digital citizens, and we can't do that when we are herded by a big central digital service. You cannot read well without learning to write at least a little, and in the same way you cannot live well in a digital world without having learned to design such a world at least a little.

Each Facebook deleter must invent new ways to live without Facebook; the deleters are the pioneers, the vanguard of a new kind of literate, informed, proud digital citizenry. They are inventing on behalf of all of us.

Godspeed them!

* Jaron Lanier's Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (The Bodley Head, £9.99) will be published on 31 May
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Be a pioneer - delete Facebook | Jaron Lanier

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When I wrote an about-to-be-published book last year about problems with social media, I thought it would be cute to call it Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. And then the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, motivating a modest but notable wave of Facebook deletions in protest, including by prominent tech figures such as Elon Musk and Brian Acton, the co-founder of WhatsApp.

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This demonstrates the choice of prosumers in that they must sell parts of their identity and privacy in order to reap the benefits of digital culture. This shows the ways in which users of products make choices and decisions and trades on what they give up to benefit from certain devices.

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SNS are designed with gambling methods to drive prosumption/profit

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SNS are designed with gambling methods to drive prosumption/profit

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SNS designers build sites in a particular way to ensure users become addicted. For example, dragging the top of the newsfeed on Facebook down to receive a reward (new information/entertainment) maps on seamlessly to slot machines – pulling a lever to get a reward. These gambling methods keep people online and prosuming to make SNS profit.

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Social media platforms are using the same techniques as gambling firms to create psychological dependencies and ingrain their products in the lives of their users, experts warn.

These methods are so effective they can activate similar mechanisms as cocaine in the brain, create psychological cravings and even invoke "phantom calls and notifications" where users sense the buzz of a smartphone, even when it isn't really there.

"Facebook, Twitter and other companies use methods similar to the gambling industry to keep users on their sites," said Natasha Schüll, the author of Addiction by Design, which reported how slot machines and other systems are designed to lock users into a cycle of addiction. "In the online economy, revenue is a function of continuous consumer attention - which is measured in clicks and time spent."

Whether it's Snapchat streaks, Facebook photo-scrolling, or playing CandyCrush, Schüll explained, you get drawn into "ludic loops" or repeated cycles of uncertainty, anticipation and feedback - and the rewards are just enough to keep you going.

"If you disengage, you get peppered with little messages or bonus offers to get your attention and pull you back in," said Schüll. "We have to start recognising the costs of time spent on social media. It's not just a game - it affects us financially, physically and emotionally."

Recreating the slot machine

The pull-to-refresh and infinite scrolling mechanism on our news feeds are unnervingly similar to a slot machine, said Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist for Google who has been described as the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience.

"You pull a lever and immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing," Harris wrote.

We cannot know when we will be rewarded, and more often than not we don't find anything interesting or gratifying, much like gambling. But that's precisely what keeps us coming back.

Phone dependency, driven by high social-media usage, can lead us to think our phone is vibrating when it isn't. Photograph: franckreporter/Getty Images

"The rewards are what psychologists refer to as variable reinforcement schedules and is the key to social media users repeatedly checking their screens," said Dr Mark Griffiths, a professor of behavioural addiction and director of Nottingham Trent University's International Gaming Research Unit.

"Social media sites are chock-a-block with unpredictable rewards. They are trying to grab users' attentions ... to make social media users create a routine and habitually check their screens."

Like gambling, which physically alters the brain's structure and makes people more susceptible to depression and anxiety, social media use has been linked to depression and its potential to have an adverse psychological impact on users cannot be overlooked or underestimated.

For instance, phone dependency, driven by high social-media usage, can lead us to think our phone is vibrating, or that we have received a message, even when we haven't.

"Phantom calls and notifications are linked to our psychological craving for such signals," said Professor Daniel Kruger, an expert in human behaviour, from the University of Michigan. "These social media messages can activate the same brain mechanisms as cocaine [does] and this is just one of the ways to identify those mechanisms because our minds are a physiological product of our brain."

"There are whole departments trying to design their systems to be as addictive as possible. They want you to be permanently online and by bombarding you with messages and stimuli try to redirect your attention back to their app or webpage."

Tech insiders have previously said " our minds can be hijacked" and that Silicon Valley is addicting us to our phones, while some have confessed they ban their kids from using social media.

However, the number of monthly active users of Facebook hit 2.13 billion earlier this year, up 14% from a year ago. Despite the furore around its data privacy issues, the social media monolith posted record revenues for the first quarter of 2018, making $11.97bn, up 49% on last year.

A key reason for this is because Facebook has become so entrenched in our lives: we can't put it down.

Behavioural psychologist, Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, has conceptualised how people become attached to social media.

"It starts with a trigger, an action, a reward and then an investment and its through successive cycles, through these hooks, that habits are formed. We see them in all sorts of products, certainly in social media and gambling. This is a big part of how habits are changed."

Once a habit is formed something previously prompted by an external trigger, like a notification, email, or any sort of ring or ding, is no longer needed, Eyal remarked.

It is replaced or supplemented with an internal trigger meaning that we form a mental association between wanting to use this product and seeking to serve an emotional need.

"The products are built to be engaging and what's engaging for some is addictive for others, that's clear."

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Social media copies gambling methods 'to create psychological cravings'

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Social media platforms are using the same techniques as gambling firms to create psychological dependencies and ingrain their products in the lives of their users, experts warn. These methods are so effective they can activate similar mechanisms as cocaine in the brain, create psychological cravings and even invoke "phantom calls and notifications" where users sense the buzz of a smartphone, even when it isn't really there.

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Social media giving painful reminders of the past 

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Social media giving painful reminders of the past 

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This article addresses the ‘on this day’ feature of Facebook can actually generate pain for some people. Users are reminded of things they might want to forget, or they may be reminded of aa happier time and sad that they aren’t that happy anymore.

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'Sometimes it has nice things,' says Cara, who works in fashion. 'But basically it's a huge reminder of lost youth. It's the standard things of reminding you how, eight years ago you were a toned, carefree cheerleader - but now you have an ass, and a mortgage.' So many of my friends, including me, have turned off the notifications for 'On This Day' because, while the nostalgia can feel warm and fuzzy, it's often tinged with sadness. It's also not as controlled as Facebook would have you believe; yes, you can block your ex boyfriend or various days that you'd prefer not to see, but you can't block everything. Talia, a freelance writer, went off the rails when her dad died, and found that 'On This Day' was a constant reminder of a really shitty time in her life.

'When my dad died, I didn't handle it the best way, so for the couple of weeks that followed all the photos were of me in some kind of drunk or other state,' she says. 'It only happened a couple of years ago so to have it be put in a 'memories' thing like it was something positive kind of blew. I ended up turning it off because I didn't need reminding I spent a good portion of six months of my life high or sleeping around. It wasn't really even the photos, just the story behind it.'

According to chartered psychologist Anita Abrams, the way in which you respond to this sort of nostalgia depends on your current situation. 'How nostalgia affects you depends where you are in your life right now,' she tells me. 'I don't think you can underestimate the amount of emotions that are triggered by looking into the past. Trips to memory lane can provoke a lot, even if you're a very level headed un-sentimental type of person.'

We seek out nostalgia, something that Facebook has capitalised on, because ( and research backs this up) it seems to help alleviate loneliness while also increasing our perceived connectedness with others. Perceived being the operative word. But while these emotions can be sometimes immediately positive, other studies have found nostalgia can make you sad depending on the sort of personality you are. A recent study by Bas Verplanken found that worriers are most at risk of nostalgia-related negativity: 'For individuals who habitually worry, nostalgia may not be such a nourishing experience,' reads the study summary. 'Habitual worriers' actual chronic state of anxiety contrasts with nostalgic memories of a carefree past, this may instigate further rumination leading to distress. A more present-oriented time perspective, such as mindfulness, is discussed as being beneﬁcial for habitual worriers.'

When we're shown the past, we can get that deflated balloon feeling because, obviously, it highlights the fact that life is barrelling onwards at a pretty alarming rate. Cara has struggled with anxiety her whole life, and agrees that the 'On This Day' feature doesn't particularly help: 'I think it discouraged me from being happy now, because it made me hark back to lost things,' she explains. 'It also compounds the need for photos of everything, instead of living in the moment - and creates anxieties where their weren't any. I looked back and saw conversations between me and an old friend that I really didn't want to look at, because she turned into a bit of a tool.'

It's this creation of anxiety, and indeed memories, where there arent any that encapsulates 'On This Day', this overwhelming onslaught of things you don't need to remember. You don't need to remember that one friend you don't talk to anymore. You don't need to remember the time you were hammered because someone you loved had died. 'People have always needed good friendship, connections and memories,' says Anita. 'But there's a real need for selectivity. Receiving unnecessary memories is emotionally overwhelming - so you need to exercise self control. If you can't turn the clock back, you have to say no! What do you want to remember? You have the power to exclude the potentially negative voices coming in.'

She's right - you do have the power. And it involves going into the top right hand corner of the 'On This Day' page and unchecking the 'notifications' button. When you fancy a look at the past, you can check it out in a controlled way. But if you don't, then you don't need to start your day feeling older, more anxious, and nostalgia-sad.

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Facebook's 'On This Day' Feature Is Actually Making You Sad

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'Sometimes it has nice things,' says Cara, who works in fashion. 'But basically it's a huge reminder of lost youth. It's the standard things of reminding you how, eight years ago you were a toned, carefree cheerleader - but now you have an ass, and a mortgage.'

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This article examines the addictive properties coded into sites like Facebook, twitter and google. He explains there are many psychological software design tricks that make people develops habits that create a craving. This explores an aspect of presumption where users are being manipulated into interacting and ultimately generating more data for the companies to sell.

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ustin Rosenstein had tweaked his laptop's operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook. But even that wasn't enough. In August, the 34-year-old tech executive took a more radical step to restrict his use of social media and other addictive technologies.

Rosenstein purchased a new iPhone and instructed his assistant to set up a parental-control feature to prevent him from downloading any apps.

He was particularly aware of the allure of Facebook "likes", which he describes as "bright dings of pseudo-pleasure" that can be as hollow as they are seductive. And Rosenstein should know: he was the Facebook engineer who created the "like" button in the first place.

A decade after he stayed up all night coding a prototype of what was then called an "awesome" button, Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called "attention economy": an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.

These refuseniks are rarely founders or chief executives, who have little incentive to deviate from the mantra that their companies are making the world a better place. Instead, they tend to have worked a rung or two down the corporate ladder: designers, engineers and product managers who, like Rosenstein, several years ago put in place the building blocks of a digital world from which they are now trying to disentangle themselves. "It is very common," Rosenstein says, "for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences."

Rosenstein, who also helped create Gchat during a stint at Google, and now leads a San Francisco-based company that improves office productivity, appears most concerned about the psychological effects on people who, research shows, touch, swipe or tap their phone 2,617 times a day.

There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called "continuous partial attention", severely limiting people's ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity - even when the device is turned off. "Everyone is distracted," Rosenstein says. "All of the time."

But those concerns are trivial compared with the devastating impact upon the political system that some of Rosenstein's peers believe can be attributed to the rise of social media and the attention-based market that drives it.

Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they contend that digital forces have completely upended the political system and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete.

In 2007, Rosenstein was one of a small group of Facebook employees who decided to create a path of least resistance - a single click - to "send little bits of positivity" across the platform. Facebook's "like" feature was, Rosenstein says, "wildly" successful: engagement soared as people enjoyed the short-term boost they got from giving or receiving social affirmation, while Facebook harvested valuable data about the preferences of users that could be sold to advertisers. The idea was soon copied by Twitter, with its heart-shaped "likes" (previously star-shaped "favourites"), Instagram, and countless other apps and websites.

It was Rosenstein's colleague, Leah Pearlman, then a product manager at Facebook and on the team that created the Facebook "like", who announced the feature in a 2009 blogpost. Now 35 and an illustrator, Pearlman confirmed via email that she, too, has grown disaffected with Facebook "likes" and other addictive feedback loops. She has installed a web browser plug-in to eradicate her Facebook news feed, and hired a social media manager to monitor her Facebook page so that she doesn't have to.

"One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before," Rosenstein says. It may or may not be relevant that Rosenstein, Pearlman and most of the tech insiders questioning today's attention economy are in their 30s, members of the last generation that can remember a world in which telephones were plugged into walls.

It is revealing that many of these younger technologists are weaning themselves off their own products, sending their children to elite Silicon Valley schools where iPhones, iPads and even laptops are banned. They appear to be abiding by a Biggie Smalls lyric from their own youth about the perils of dealing crack cocaine: never get high on your own supply.

ne morning in April this year, designers, programmers and tech entrepreneurs from across the world gathered at a conference centre on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. They had each paid up to $1,700 to learn how to manipulate people into habitual use of their products, on a course curated by conference organiser Nir Eyal.

Eyal, 39, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, has spent several years consulting for the tech industry, teaching techniques he developed by closely studying how the Silicon Valley giants operate.

"The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions," Eyal writes. "It's the impulse to check a message notification. It's the pull to visit YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter for just a few minutes, only to find yourself still tapping and scrolling an hour later." None of this is an accident, he writes. It is all "just as their designers intended".

He explains the subtle psychological tricks that can be used to make people develop habits, such as varying the rewards people receive to create "a craving", or exploiting negative emotions that can act as "triggers". "Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation," Eyal writes.

Attendees of the 2017 Habit Summit might have been surprised when Eyal walked on stage to announce that this year's keynote speech was about "something a little different". He wanted to address the growing concern that technological manipulation was somehow harmful or immoral. He told his audience that they should be careful not to abuse persuasive design, and wary of crossing a line into coercion.

But he was defensive of the techniques he teaches, and dismissive of those who compare tech addiction to drugs. "We're not freebasing Facebook and injecting Instagram here," he said. He flashed up a slide of a shelf filled with sugary baked goods. "Just as we shouldn't blame the baker for making such delicious treats, we can't blame tech makers for making their products so good we want to use them," he said. "Of course that's what tech companies will do. And frankly: do we want it any other way?"

Without irony, Eyal finished his talk with some personal tips for resisting the lure of technology. He told his audience he uses a Chrome extension, called DF YouTube, "which scrubs out a lot of those external triggers" he writes about in his book, and recommended an app called Pocket Points that "rewards you for staying off your phone when you need to focus".

Finally, Eyal confided the lengths he goes to protect his own family. He has installed in his house an outlet timer connected to a router that cuts off access to the internet at a set time every day. "The idea is to remember that we are not powerless," he said. "We are in control."

But are we? If the people who built these technologies are taking such radical steps to wean themselves free, can the rest of us reasonably be expected to exercise our free will?

Not according to Tristan Harris, a 33-year-old former Google employee turned vocal critic of the tech industry. "All of us are jacked into this system," he says. "All of our minds can be hijacked. Our choices are not as free as we think they are."

Harris, who has been branded "the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience", insists that billions of people have little choice over whether they use these now ubiquitous technologies, and are largely unaware of the invisible ways in which a small number of people in Silicon Valley are shaping their lives.

A graduate of Stanford University, Harris studied under BJ Fogg, a behavioural psychologist revered in tech circles for mastering the ways technological design can be used to persuade people. Many of his students, including Eyal, have gone on to prosperous careers in Silicon Valley.

Harris is the student who went rogue; a whistleblower of sorts, he is lifting the curtain on the vast powers accumulated by technology companies and the ways they are using that influence. "A handful of people, working at a handful of technology companies, through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today," he said at a recent TED talk in Vancouver.

"I don't know a more urgent problem than this," Harris says. "It's changing our democracy, and it's changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships that we want with each other." Harris went public - giving talks, writing papers, meeting lawmakers and campaigning for reform after three years struggling to effect change inside Google's Mountain View headquarters.

It all began in 2013, when he was working as a product manager at Google, and circulated a thought-provoking memo, A Call To Minimise Distraction & Respect Users' Attention, to 10 close colleagues. It struck a chord, spreading to some 5,000 Google employees, including senior executives who rewarded Harris with an impressive-sounding new job: he was to be Google's in-house design ethicist and product philosopher.

Looking back, Harris sees that he was promoted into a marginal role. "I didn't have a social support structure at all," he says. Still, he adds: "I got to sit in a corner and think and read and understand."

He explored how LinkedIn exploits a need for social reciprocity to widen its network; how YouTube and Netflix autoplay videos and next episodes, depriving users of a choice about whether or not they want to keep watching; how Snapchat created its addictive Snapstreaks feature, encouraging near-constant communication between its mostly teenage users.

The techniques these companies use are not always generic: they can be algorithmically tailored to each person. An internal Facebook report leaked this year, for example, revealed that the company can identify when teens feel "insecure", "worthless" and "need a confidence boost". Such granular information, Harris adds, is "a perfect model of what buttons you can push in a particular person".

Tech companies can exploit such vulnerabilities to keep people hooked; manipulating, for example, when people receive "likes" for their posts, ensuring they arrive when an individual is likely to feel vulnerable, or in need of approval, or maybe just bored. And the very same techniques can be sold to the highest bidder. "There's no ethics," he says. A company paying Facebook to use its levers of persuasion could be a car business targeting tailored advertisements to different types of users who want a new vehicle. Or it could be a Moscow-based troll farm seeking to turn voters in a swing county in Wisconsin.

Harris believes that tech companies never deliberately set out to make their products addictive. They were responding to the incentives of an advertising economy, experimenting with techniques that might capture people's attention, even stumbling across highly effective design by accident.

A friend at Facebook told Harris that designers initially decided the notification icon, which alerts people to new activity such as "friend requests" or "likes", should be blue. It fit Facebook's style and, the thinking went, would appear "subtle and innocuous". "But no one used it," Harris says. "Then they switched it to red and of course everyone used it."

That red icon is now everywhere. When smartphone users glance at their phones, dozens or hundreds of times a day, they are confronted with small red dots beside their apps, pleading to be tapped. "Red is a trigger colour," Harris says. "That's why it is used as an alarm signal."

The most seductive design, Harris explains, exploits the same psychological susceptibility that makes gambling so compulsive: variable rewards. When we tap those apps with red icons, we don't know whether we'll discover an interesting email, an avalanche of "likes", or nothing at all. It is the possibility of disappointment that makes it so compulsive.

It's this that explains how the pull-to-refresh mechanism, whereby users swipe down, pause and wait to see what content appears, rapidly became one of the most addictive and ubiquitous design features in modern technology. "Each time you're swiping down, it's like a slot machine," Harris says. "You don't know what's coming next. Sometimes it's a beautiful photo. Sometimes it's just an ad."

The designer who created the pull-to-refresh mechanism, first used to update Twitter feeds, is Loren Brichter, widely admired in the app-building community for his sleek and intuitive designs.

Now 32, Brichter says he never intended the design to be addictive - but would not dispute the slot machine comparison. "I agree 100%," he says. "I have two kids now and I regret every minute that I'm not paying attention to them because my smartphone has sucked me in."

Brichter created the feature in 2009 for Tweetie, his startup, mainly because he could not find anywhere to fit the "refresh" button on his app. Holding and dragging down the feed to update seemed at the time nothing more than a "cute and clever" fix. Twitter acquired Tweetie the following year, integrating pull-to-refresh into its own app.

Since then the design has become one of the most widely emulated features in apps; the downward-pull action is, for hundreds of millions of people, as intuitive as scratching an itch.

Brichter says he is puzzled by the longevity of the feature. In an era of push notification technology, apps can automatically update content without being nudged by the user. "It could easily retire," he says. Instead it appears to serve a psychological function: after all, slot machines would be far less addictive if gamblers didn't get to pull the lever themselves. Brichter prefers another comparison: that it is like the redundant "close door" button in some elevators with automatically closing doors. "People just like to push it."

All of which has left Brichter, who has put his design work on the backburner while he focuses on building a house in New Jersey, questioning his legacy. "I've spent many hours and weeks and months and years thinking about whether anything I've done has made a net positive impact on society or humanity at all," he says. He has blocked certain websites, turned off push notifications, restricted his use of the Telegram app to message only with his wife and two close friends, and tried to wean himself off Twitter. "I still waste time on it," he confesses, "just reading stupid news I already know about." He charges his phone in the kitchen, plugging it in at 7pm and not touching it until the next morning.

"Smartphones are useful tools," he says. "But they're addictive. Pull-to-refresh is addictive. Twitter is addictive. These are not good things. When I was working on them, it was not something I was mature enough to think about. I'm not saying I'm mature now, but I'm a little bit more mature, and I regret the downsides."

Not everyone in his field appears racked with guilt. The two inventors listed on Apple's patent for "managing notification connections and displaying icon badges" are Justin Santamaria and Chris Marcellino. Both were in their early 20s when they were hired by Apple to work on the iPhone. As engineers, they worked on the behind-the-scenes plumbing for push-notification technology, introduced in 2009 to enable real-time alerts and updates to hundreds of thousands of third-party app developers. It was a revolutionary change, providing the infrastructure for so many experiences that now form a part of people's daily lives, from ordering an Uber to making a Skype call to receiving breaking news updates.

But notification technology also enabled a hundred unsolicited interruptions into millions of lives, accelerating the arms race for people's attention. Santamaria, 36, who now runs a startup after a stint as the head of mobile at Airbnb, says the technology he developed at Apple was not "inherently good or bad". "This is a larger discussion for society," he says. "Is it OK to shut off my phone when I leave work? Is it OK if I don't get right back to you? Is it OK that I'm not 'liking' everything that goes through my Instagram screen?"

His then colleague, Marcellino, agrees. "Honestly, at no point was I sitting there thinking: let's hook people," he says. "It was all about the positives: these apps connect people, they have all these uses - ESPN telling you the game has ended, or WhatsApp giving you a message for free from your family member in Iran who doesn't have a message plan."

A few years ago Marcellino, 33, left the Bay Area, and is now in the final stages of retraining to be a neurosurgeon. He stresses he is no expert on addiction, but says he has picked up enough in his medical training to know that technologies can affect the same neurological pathways as gambling and drug use. "These are the same circuits that make people seek out food, comfort, heat, sex," he says.

All of it, he says, is reward-based behaviour that activates the brain's dopamine pathways. He sometimes finds himself clicking on the red icons beside his apps "to make them go away", but is conflicted about the ethics of exploiting people's psychological vulnerabilities. "It is not inherently evil to bring people back to your product," he says. "It's capitalism."

That, perhaps, is the problem. Roger McNamee, a venture capitalist who benefited from hugely profitable investments in Google and Facebook, has grown disenchanted with both companies, arguing that their early missions have been distorted by the fortunes they have been able to earn through advertising.

He identifies the advent of the smartphone as a turning point, raising the stakes in an arms race for people's attention. "Facebook and Google assert with merit that they are giving users what they want," McNamee says. "The same can be said about tobacco companies and drug dealers."

That would be a remarkable assertion for any early investor in Silicon Valley's most profitable behemoths. But McNamee, 61, is more than an arms-length money man. Once an adviser to Mark Zuckerberg, 10 years ago McNamee introduced the Facebook CEO to his friend, Sheryl Sandberg, then a Google executive who had overseen the company's advertising efforts. Sandberg, of course, became chief operating officer at Facebook, transforming the social network into another advertising heavyweight.

McNamee chooses his words carefully. "The people who run Facebook and Google are good people, whose well-intentioned strategies have led to horrific unintended consequences," he says. "The problem is that there is nothing the companies can do to address the harm unless they abandon their current advertising models."

But how can Google and Facebook be forced to abandon the business models that have transformed them into two of the most profitable companies on the planet?

McNamee believes the companies he invested in should be subjected to greater regulation, including new anti-monopoly rules. In Washington, there is growing appetite, on both sides of the political divide, to rein in Silicon Valley. But McNamee worries the behemoths he helped build may already be too big to curtail. "The EU recently penalised Google $2.42bn for anti-monopoly violations, and Google's shareholders just shrugged," he says.

Rosenstein, the Facebook "like" co-creator, believes there may be a case for state regulation of "psychologically manipulative advertising", saying the moral impetus is comparable to taking action against fossil fuel or tobacco companies. "If we only care about profit maximisation," he says, "we will go rapidly into dystopia."

ames Williams does not believe talk of dystopia is far-fetched. The ex-Google strategist who built the metrics system for the company's global search advertising business, he has had a front-row view of an industry he describes as the "largest, most standardised and most centralised form of attentional control in human history".

Williams, 35, left Google last year, and is on the cusp of completing a PhD at Oxford University exploring the ethics of persuasive design. It is a journey that has led him to question whether democracy can survive the new technological age.

He says his epiphany came a few years ago, when he noticed he was surrounded by technology that was inhibiting him from concentrating on the things he wanted to focus on. "It was that kind of individual, existential realisation: what's going on?" he says. "Isn't technology supposed to be doing the complete opposite of this?"

That discomfort was compounded during a moment at work, when he glanced at one of Google's dashboards, a multicoloured display showing how much of people's attention the company had commandeered for advertisers. "I realised: this is literally a million people that we've sort of nudged or persuaded to do this thing that they weren't going to otherwise do," he recalls.

He embarked on several years of independent research, much of it conducted while working part-time at Google. About 18 months in, he saw the Google memo circulated by Harris and the pair became allies, struggling to bring about change from within.

Williams and Harris left Google around the same time, and co-founded an advocacy group, Time Well Spent, that seeks to build public momentum for a change in the way big tech companies think about design. Williams finds it hard to comprehend why this issue is not "on the front page of every newspaper every day.

"Eighty-seven percent of people wake up and go to sleep with their smartphones," he says. The entire world now has a new prism through which to understand politics, and Williams worries the consequences are profound.

The same forces that led tech firms to hook users with design tricks, he says, also encourage those companies to depict the world in a way that makes for compulsive, irresistible viewing. "The attention economy incentivises the design of technologies that grab our attention," he says. "In so doing, it privileges our impulses over our intentions."

That means privileging what is sensational over what is nuanced, appealing to emotion, anger and outrage. The news media is increasingly working in service to tech companies, Williams adds, and must play by the rules of the attention economy to "sensationalise, bait and entertain in order to survive".

In the wake of Donald Trump's stunning electoral victory, many were quick to question the role of so-called "fake news" on Facebook, Russian-created Twitter bots or the data-centric targeting efforts that companies such as Cambridge Analytica used to sway voters. But Williams sees those factors as symptoms of a deeper problem.

It is not just shady or bad actors who were exploiting the internet to change public opinion. The attention economy itself is set up to promote a phenomenon like Trump, who is masterly at grabbing and retaining the attention of supporters and critics alike, often by exploiting or creating outrage.

Williams was making this case before the president was elected. In a blog published a month before the US election, Williams sounded the alarm bell on an issue he argued was a "far more consequential question" than whether Trump reached the White House. The reality TV star's campaign, he said, had heralded a watershed in which "the new, digitally supercharged dynamics of the attention economy have finally crossed a threshold and become manifest in the political realm".

Williams saw a similar dynamic unfold months earlier, during the Brexit campaign, when the attention economy appeared to him biased in favour of the emotional, identity-based case for the UK leaving the European Union. He stresses these dynamics are by no means isolated to the political right: they also play a role, he believes, in the unexpected popularity of leftwing politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, and the frequent outbreaks of internet outrage over issues that ignite fury among progressives.

All of which, Williams says, is not only distorting the way we view politics but, over time, may be changing the way we think, making us less rational and more impulsive. "We've habituated ourselves into a perpetual cognitive style of outrage, by internalising the dynamics of the medium," he says.

It is against this political backdrop that Williams argues the fixation in recent years with the surveillance state fictionalised by George Orwell may have been misplaced. It was another English science fiction writer, Aldous Huxley, who provided the more prescient observation when he warned that Orwellian-style coercion was less of a threat to democracy than the more subtle power of psychological manipulation, and "man's almost infinite appetite for distractions".

Since the US election, Williams has explored another dimension to today's brave new world. If the attention economy erodes our ability to remember, to reason, to make decisions for ourselves - faculties that are essential to self-governance - what hope is there for democracy itself?

"The dynamics of the attention economy are structurally set up to undermine the human will," he says. "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?

"Will we be able to recognise it, if and when it happens?" Williams replies. "And if we can't, then how do we know it hasn't happened already?"

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'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

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The Google, Apple and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks who worry the race for human attention has created a world of perpetual distraction that could ultimately end in disaster

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This meme represents that we are connected through technology, but in the ability to be connected can prevent us from being present in our physical settings.

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We are forced to live with our past selves through social media

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We are forced to live with our past selves through social media

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This article addresses the fact that we are constantly confronted with our past identity on social media which could in fact prevent us from recreating ourselves or hinder our ability to change. For example, persistent images cause us to be reminded of our past and things we may not want to remember but are forced to relive every time they surface social media.

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Last year, I had a strange dream. My father and I were wading in an industrial canal, reminiscent of a subway, as thousands of hatchery-raised fish were being released into it. The fish crowded, slimy, around our legs, and I knew (in the way that one knows in a dream) that they thought, as they hit the water, that they were drowning-that they had to experience death before entering adulthood. The next day, I told my father about the dream. He revealed that, when I was three, when we were living in Pittsburgh, he took me to see a truckful of catfish being pumped into an artificial pond. I was too young to remember this. But somewhere in my mind the vision of fish being spewed into water had lodged itself, resurfacing more than twenty-five years later.

These days, it's common to find an image emerging, unbeckoned, from the reservoir of the past. We spend hours wading through streams of photos, many of which document, in unprecedented ways, our daily lives. Facebook was invented in 2004. By 2015, Kate Eichhorn writes in " The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media," people were sharing thirty million images an hour on Snapchat, and British parents "posted, on average, nearly two hundred photographs of their child online each year." For those who have grown up with social media-a group that includes pretty much everyone under twenty-five-childhood, an era that was fruitfully mysterious for the rest of us, is surprisingly accessible. According to Eichhorn, a media historian at the New School, this is certain to have some kind of profound effect on the development of identity. What that effect will be we're not quite sure.

Eichhorn sees both sides of the coin. On the one hand, she says, children and teen-agers have gained a level of control that they didn't have before. In the past, adults refused to acknowledge children's agency, or imposed on them an idealized notion of innocence and purity. Adults were the ones writing books, taking photos with expensive cameras, and commissioning paintings, all of which tended to commemorate childhood-to look back at it-rather than participate in it. The arrival of cheaply made instant photos, in the nineteen-sixties, allowed children to seize a means of production, and the arrival of the Internet gave them an unprecedented degree of self-determination. "If childhood was once constructed and recorded by adults and mirrored back to children (e.g., in a carefully curated family photo album or a series of home video clips), this is no longer the case," Eichhorn writes. "Today, young people create images and put them into circulation without the interference of adults."

This practice can be hugely beneficial. New technology-especially the smartphone-allows us to produce a narrative of our lives, to choose what to remember and what to contribute to our own mythos. For Eichhorn, this is the latest instance of a long-held, if mysterious, practice. "Long before children were able to create, edit, and curate images of their lives," she writes, "they were already doing so on a psychic level." Freud called these images "screen memories"-no pun intended-and he thought that we used them to soften or obscure painful experiences. Humans have always tried to cope with the difficulty of memory, to turn it "from an intolerable horror to something which is reassuringly innocuous and familiar." Social media just makes us more adept at it.

On the other hand, Eichhorn writes, such media can prevent those who wish to break with their past from doing so cleanly. We're not the only ones posting; our friends and family chronicle our lives, usually without our consent. Growing up online, Eichhorn worries, might impede our ability to edit memories, cull what needs to be culled, and move on. "The potential danger is no longer childhood's disappearance, but rather the possibility of a perpetual childhood," she writes. We may, in short, have traded "screen memories for screens."

This is of particular import for those who yearn to establish new identities. People who transition, for instance, often rely on having a clean break, visually, with their previous appearances; as Eichhorn points out, one of the early promises of the Internet, when it was just "texts and clip art," was that it "presented itself as a safe place [for transgender youth] to try on an aspect of their identities they could not explore in their material lives." Now that the Internet is more permanent, and more pervasive, it's hard to avoid the relics of past identities. Eichhorn cites one of her students, Kevin, an aspiring film critic from a small town in upstate New York. By his second year of college, Kevin says, his Facebook stream "was getting really weird. I had my new friends from New York posting about queer performance art and these guys from my high school posting about dirt biking in a gravel pit and tagging me in photographs from high school. I needed to move on." Although he deactivated his social-media accounts and created new ones under a pseudonym, he continued to be tagged in old photos. "I guess that Kevin is out there for good," he says. "I just have to live with him and all those people he was trying to escape."

The persistence of certain images is more of a problem for some than for others. There are moments, elevated not by the fact of being recorded but by the impossibility of being erased, that become traumatic. These situations-in which a naked photo or an offensive tweet destroys a person's public life-are unfortunate, and widely covered (for example, in Jon Ronson's " So You've Been Publicly Shamed "). Eichhorn details the case of Ghyslain Raza, a Canadian teen-ager who, in 2002, recorded himself wielding a golf-ball retriever as though it were a lightsabre. The video, which was found by a classmate, titled "Star Wars Kid," and uploaded to the Internet, was viewed by millions of people; as Eichhorn points out, this all happened at a time when virality, as a phenomenon, wasn't really a thing. Raza was bullied at school and ended up in a psychiatric ward. In 2013, still unable to escape the video, despite legal action, he spoke publicly about his experience, describing his contemplation of suicide.

Everyone, Eichhorn writes, benefits from experimentation in adolescence. During that time, we exist in what the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson called a psychosocial "moratorium"-a stage in which we hover "between the morality learned by the child and the ethics to be developed by the adult." The moratorium is a period of trial and error that society allows adolescents, who are permitted to take risks without fear of consequence, in hopes that doing so will clarify a "core self-a personal sense of what gives life meaning." The Internet interrupts the privacy of this era; it tends to scale up mistakes to monumental proportions, and to put them on our permanent records. Colleges and employers now look at social-media accounts for evidence of character. Eichhorn spends less time than she might have on how this affects today's teens. What is it like to live under threat? What are the ramifications when an entire generation never gets the chance to experiment freely or to remake themselves?

Eichhorn does lightly gesture to a kind of universal human right, one that runs counter to the whims of companies that use data. "Forgetting-that once taken-for-granted built-in resource that all humans possessed-is now being pitted against the interests of technology companies," she writes, implying, with an endearing idealism, that we have a right to forget. (For some, this belief might reflect a distinctly American approach to the rest of the world.) More plausibly, she cites the right to be forgotten, which is the nickname of both data privacy regulations in Europe and movements against naming minors in the media. Either way, the implication is that the ability to detach from one's past self-to move laterally, as an individual, into a new body or personality-is a democratic ideal. We also have the right to stay as we are. In some cases, retaining our sense of self across chasms that might destroy it is more important than having a rebellious phase. Take, for instance, the case of migrants, which Eichhorn touches on briefly: "Family members left behind can now stay in constant touch with their sons and daughters and even track their footsteps across Europe." Here, memory is almost a form of political representation, enabled by social media; groups are able to preserve their history as they travel across continents.

Are all photos documentary? In " The Social Photo," Nathan Jurgenson puts forth the useful proposition that most online photos are about sharing experiences, not creating memories. In one passage, Jurgenson, a founder of Real Life magazine, writes that selfies are "less an accurate picture of me at this time in this place and more . . . a visual depiction of the idea of me." They're units of communication, more emojis or hieroglyphics than portraits; they have little context, aren't discernibly located anywhere, and typically come in the aggregate. For the most part, it wouldn't really matter if they existed in twenty years. This explains the prevalence of disappearing photos, like Instagram stories and Snapchat. (Jurgenson is also a sociologist for Snap Inc., Snapchat's parent company.) It also explains photos of food, which are rarely artful or worth saving.

For Jurgenson, taking social photos changes the way vision works-a process that began with the advent of cameras and is still evolving today. Teen-agers are cyborgs, and their phones are mechanical eyes that help them interpret their experience. "To document," Jurgenson writes, "is to be involved with our own experience instead of passively letting it float by." On this subject, Jurgenson has all the right, if somewhat dutiful, opinions: nostalgia is overrated, but he's not into "digital austerity." We shouldn't hark back to an era in which we were less attached to technology-mostly because that era doesn't exist. "Our reality has always been already mediated, augmented, documented," he writes, "and there's no access to some state of unmediated purity." We shouldn't ask whether social photography is good, but how it can be good.

Jurgenson, unlike Eichhorn, isn't worried about the Internet making it hard to bury past versions of ourselves. If anything, he fears the prevalence of death. Photos, he writes, "embalm" their subjects, encasing them in a "stilling sadness that kills what it attempts to save out of a fear of losing it." For him, the risk of constant documentation is alienation: a sense that our bodies are generating still moments rather than constant movement. He cites Wolfgang Schivelbusch, a German scholar who wrote about the effect of the railway on human perception. With its speed and glass windows, "the train flattens nature into something smooth and predictable, not something traveled within but something easily seen and consumed," Jurgenson writes. "As more of life is experienced through camera screens, does it occur at a similar remove, where the messiness of lived experience is made into something merely observable?"

It would, indeed, be stunning if we were able to see painful moments from the past-the ones we meditate on for years-as dead and embalmed. The trouble is, most difficult memories aren't captured by photos, videos, or tweets. Screens, like screen memories, are avoidant; they turn away from the painful. There are few crying children on Instagram. A friend, whose mother digitized all her family's old home videos, recently told me about a significant birthday party at the roller rink. What she remembered was the drama beforehand: at the time, she was obsessed with Rollerblades, and when the rink had only roller skates her mother rushed to a sports store to get an inline pair, barely saving the day. None of this, it turned out, was captured in the video. All it showed was the triumph-a redemptive moment after tears, and a happy loop around the rink.

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Nausicaa Renner writes on how the Internet-especially social-media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat-makes it difficult for people to escape their previous identities.

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This is a satirical meme. The girl is being eaten by a shark but before she must share it online. This relates to identity maintenance online and how it often comes before real life in list of priorities. People want to share events happening without actually experiencing them. Digital Culture is a distinct reality.

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People are checking out on real life and checking in online

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People are checking out on real life and checking in online

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This article begs people to stop living their life online. It argues more than ever people are checking out of real life and living their life online. She says everyone should ask their self; is social media a distraction from your real problems?; do you use social media to feel like the person you wish you were; do you interact more with people online than you do in real life?; and do you use social media to seek validation. If so, it is time to stop living online and start interacting with real people.

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Social media is not real life.

Social media does not tell the whole story.

Social media is not a substitute for real life human interaction.

I've noticed something disturbing over the past 2 years. It seems that more and more people are living their lives online and checking out of real life.

On social media, we can be anyone we want to be. We can be secure, confident, call ourselves leaders, and we can present the image of having it all together. Our followers will never know that we are plagued by low self-esteem, crippling insecurity, and feel as if our world is falling apart.

Social media has provided everyday people with platforms and an audience. What is key to remember is that most of this audience doesn't know you. The real you. The 'you' that exists in real life and not the persona you're presenting to the world.

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you feel you are living your life online:

Social media has become a distraction for people to forget about the real problems in their lives and not address them. They can use that energy towards the latest outrage story on social media rather than using that energy towards actual problems in their lives.

I don't think there is any better example than Election 2016.

People spent a great deal of time on social media arguing with each other about the election. I started to wonder if people were spending as much time on their families, personal development, finances, and health.

While there are real life consequences to the election and I am not minimizing the importance of what has just happened, I can't help but think that a lot of the energy people spent arguing at one another on Facebook would have been better spent on focusing on their real life issues.

On social media, people can be anything that they want to be. They can be confident, secure, and pass themselves off as expert leaders.

Followers are none the wiser that these are all lies and the person has low self-esteem, crippling insecurity, and is simply parroting the last book they read.

This is one of the real dangers of living online - people can start to believe their own hype. They can start to believe the persona that they've created online is real. The 'Likes', 'You're so awesome' and 'You're so amazing' affirmations from people who are none the wiser to what's really going on behind the scenes can lead to a false sense of security.

I've seen it happen time and time again. The person who brags about living the FABULOUS life and puts forth the artificially happy persona on social media either is found out to be a fraud or they confess that their persona is based on lies. (That's another story for another day)

I love this cartoon because it gives an honest snapshot of the truth. Facebook 'Friends' and social media connections are no substitutes for real life human interaction and connections.

I have an online business but I make it a point to talk to people over video conference so that I can see their faces and show them that they are interacting with a real life person.

Even though being online gives me access to help more people, I don't want my entire business to be online because I like connecting with real human beings face to face. I go to workshops, seminars, conferences, etc because I like to meet new people.

Guess what? I've connected with many of them online first and then we meet and it's awesome!

Humans thrive within a community but social media has given people a false sense of community and connection.

4000 Facebook Friends doesn't mean much when you're sitting in the dark eating cereal by yourself.

I am not opposed to connecting online. I've met lots of awesome people that way but it is no substitute for real life human interaction.

Looking to social media for validation is a big clue that you're living your life online.

If you need the 'Likes' the 'You're so awesome' and 'You're so amazing' from people who don't really know YOU, then it's time for some self-reflection.

Can I be blunt here? Validation is validation.

Whether it's the constant selfies for likes or baring really intimate details about your life hoping for a reaction you're looking for validation.

Is it good to be honest and transparent so that you can help others?

Yes, but I think there is a line.
When you're looking to people for validation who don't know the REAL YOU but only know the persona you've created on social media, then how much weight do their words of validation actually carry?
Rarely have I seen people be honest with someone who is baring very intimate details of their life. I get we want to be supportive and encouraging but sometimes people need the TRUTH. They don't need the "You're awesome, amazing, I don't really know you but you seem so awesome."

People need to hear painful truths sometimes and if you really care about someone public social media posts are not the place for that - just the same as I don't think talk shows are the place to air dirty family laundry.

Here are Tips to stop living online and start living your life -

1. Set boundaries for what you do and do not post: Some aspects of your life need to be kept sacred and should be protected. By keeping some parts of your life private and not for public consumption, there is less of a temptation to live online.

2. Ask yourself: 'Why am I posting this? Am I looking for approval, validation, or affirmation?' If the answer is yes, then why? Are you lonely? Bored? Feeling Insecure? It's better to address those issues than looking to social media for temporary validation.

3. Sign up for events with real people. The computer is great and I've made some great connections with people online but you still need to interact with real people. Sign up for workshops, seminars, or live events in subjects that you're interested in. Being around people with the same interests is always so inspiring.

4. Take a social media break: At least once every quarter, go off the grid for a few days - even if it's a weekend. If the thought of going off of social media for a few days fills you with anxiety, then you may need to go cold turkey for a longer period. The longest that I ever deactivated from social media was about 6 months and it was awesome. It was a rough patch in my life and I'm glad that I did it because I was not distracted during that 6 months. I also wasn't posting endless platitudes looking for validation. It was a great time of reflection and honesty. I was able to get to the root of a lot of issues and hear the TRUTH and not 'You're so awesome, amazing' and whatever else from social media well-wishers.

I've heard it said that we are more connected than ever before and also more isolated and divided. I think much of this would change if we stopped living online in our echo chambers and got out and interacted with real-life human beings.
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Social media is not real life. Social media does not tell the whole story. Social media is not a substitute for real life human interaction. I've noticed something disturbing over the past 2 years. It seems that more and more people are living their lives online and checking out of real life.

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This is a funny meme showing the ways in which social media is a place to present an idealised version of yourself. In the reflection the apple looks perfect, but in reality, it is decaying inside. This is a satirical depiction of social media.

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Social media bombards us with pictures and updates on everyone else being successful and happy or to compete for validation or attention.

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It was a few months after my graduation and I had just quit my job. I had a horrible boss and a toxic work environment at best. There were a few people there that made it bearable, but I digress. I graduated with honors from a university in Boston, volunteered, got involved in the departmental matters and everything, but there I was sitting in my apartment without a job for three months.

In between looking for jobs and updating my resume and crap, I would find myself moseying over to Facebook from time to time. I wish I hadn't, but I was addicted. In some ways it was a way to stay in tune with what's going on in the world. However, that came with a price.

Constant images of success, happiness, new jobs, internships, vacations, pregnancies, and wedding engagements inundated me to no end. As a result, I sank deeper into my funk. I grew so envious of my Facebook friends that I didn't speak to any of them, like any of their statuses, or interact with them in any way, shape, or form. I was hurting myself more than they were inadvertently hurting me.
It's a psychological game that social media forces us to play. It forces images of perfection and happiness down our throats everyday to compel us to compete with others for attention and validation.
Bad news is there's not much we can do about it. It's everywhere! Pinterest is entirely dedicated to making you lust after things you don't have, and don't get me started about Instagram. The reality is that we are being force fed images that evoke feelings of envy, inadequacy and inferiority. Social media, commercials, advertisements, Youtube videos, movies, etc. So what do we do about it? We may not be able to remove the imagery in question entirely from our lives, but we can learn to regulate how we react and do little things to push us towards true contentment.

Remove Yourself

While you may not be able to remove yourself entirely from social media, you can cut out the websites that are causing you the most grief. You don't need to be on Facebook everyday to know what's happening with your friends. It's perfectly acceptable to check in once a week or once every two weeks. Whatever you feel like is best for you. Remove yourself from sites or anything that causes you to feel inferior or compels you to lust after things you don't have. Keep in mind that if you have a website that constantly reminds you of everything you don't have, yet it doesn't bother you or make you feel less than, you can still use those sites. Just use them productively. They may be good idea generators for using the things you do have!

Assess Your Attitude

In a world of selfies and narcissism, it's easy to think you deserve attention and praise. After all, John got a bunch of attention and he doesn't even do anything important! You won't want to hear this, but you do not deserve a bunch of attention just because you want it. You don't deserve any more than John does. So check your ego and make sure that you don't allow your head to swell up with envy. On the flip side, a lot of our Facebook friends actually do post impressive accomplishments and that is probably much worst. Any update of any kind is embellished with a witty quip and a filtered photograph (throw a few hashtags in there for good measure) and posted straight to social media. What people don't realize is that while they're posting their lives on Facebook, there is a psychological burden that their audience may face. Fact is, they probably don't care and neither should you. Their success isn't your failure. Their success is their success and your success is your success. Be happy for that person and move on. If it makes you feel better, begin planning the ways you want to succeed and make goals for yourself. Or you can make a list of all the things that you accomplished recently.

Understand What Happiness Isn't

Please understand that getting a bunch of likes on Facebook or Instagram does not constitute happiness. Sure you'll be pretty cheery about it for a while, but then you'll crave more likes and more attention once that has worn off. The cycle never ends. Focus instead on being successful in your own way as opposed to the way that will get likes. Also keep in mind that although people have big smiles and pretty faces on Facebook, that doesn't mean that is the end all be all. It's a single still photograph of a single moment. In the background a lot of darker things are probably going on in their lives. Everyone is struggling with something, but their way of coping with it may be different from yours. Maybe the way they cope with hardship is to garner attention for posting pictures of the more picturesque side of their lives. The validation may help them feel better. While some of us (me included) are happiest far far away from other people. Neither of these is more right than the other. It's just a matter of what makes you happy.

Replace Social Media

Now that you've purged your life of some of the more toxic social media sites, you can begin to find other things to do to fill your time. If you find yourself bored on the subway, on the bus or in line, try reading a book through the Kindle app instead. Or surf the web using Stumble Upon, an app that directs you to random websites based on your interests. Maybe listen to a podcast about old pioneers or watch a Ted Talks about something. Whatever you do, just make your not scrolling through social media for hours.

You can find the study linking depression to excessive Facebook use to depression here

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Read This If You Feel Like Social Media Is Making You Depressed

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It was a few months after my graduation and I had just quit my job. I had a horrible boss and a toxic work environment at best. There were a few people there that made it bearable, but I digress.