Two things that prompted the memory of quitting social media I just posted:
- Reading Nobody is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. I second @JohnBrady’s recommendation, which is how I found out about it. Obviously it’s a short and engrossing book since I read it in less than a day. (It may have distracted me from work a bit yesterday…)
- This from Rhyd Wildermuth:
In the process of breaking my years-long addiction to social media, it was the internalized self-limiting framing of writing with which I struggled most. This kind of reduction and flattening are seen best in the formulaic way in which the algorithms train us to write, the repetition of meaningless phrases like “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but;” “Unpopular opinion, but”, “Okay, sooo,” or the meme-derived rephrasing of opinions in the form of conversational comparisons between “literally nobody ever” and the target of the post.
Becoming trained to read and write by computers, we begin also to think like computers. Our writing becomes as processed as the food available in supermarkets and our thinking as standardized and as unremarkable as its flavors.