Social media if you must
Harm minimisation for corporate social network users
April 5, 2017 — April 21, 2022
You don’t want unaccountable monopolies mining every intimate detail of your personal relationships and deepest confidences? You don’t want them sharing it even though they promised not to? You don’t want them looking at your junk?
Then don’t use corporate social networks.
OK, in fact, not using them is harder than you’d like, because
- The No-network effect means that all your friends have forgotten how to manage their life without Facebook all up in their business, i.e. there is a dilemma of collective action here
- If you log in to one of these accursed things even once, you are tracked in perpetuity by the browser cookies and web beacons and such which hang around you like the stink of dog turd on your shoe, so also need to work out how to wash that off.
- We are social primates doing bullshit jobs with smartphones in our pockets and we crave social distraction from the relentless grind of late capitalism.
How do you say?
after I post this status, I will be quitting Facebook, except for groups, events, messaging, sharing my take on controversial op-eds, promoting my podcast(s), and seething with jealousy about my friends’ positive life updates.
1 Remind yourself you do not need this
Well put: The 11th Reason to Delete your Social Media Account: the Algorithm will Find You. Elizabeth’s letter to herself is measured.
Purportedly, Social media and television use — but not video games — predict depression and anxiety in teens
[…] playing video games was not a predictor of either depression or anxiety, which may be because gaming has become more of a social activity. “Compared with their forerunners 15 to 20 years ago, the average video gamer is not socially isolated. It has been shown that more than 70% of gamers play their games with a friend, either physically together or online,” the researchers noted in their study.
The researchers also found some evidence that interacting with media that promoted upward social comparisons was associated with reductions in self-esteem, which in turn was associated with increases in depressive symptoms.
Elizabeth Van Nostrand’s Social Media triptych
Why the right wing has a massive advantage on Facebook has this provocative quote:
“Right-wing populism is always more engaging,” a Facebook executive said in a recent interview with POLITICO reporters, when pressed why the pages of conservatives drive such high interactions. The person said the content speaks to “an incredibly strong, primitive emotion” by touching on such topics as “nation, protection, the other, anger, fear”.
Obviously anger and fear are a popular theme upon which no political wing holds a monopoly, but I think you could slice this statement into a more contentful one. To follow up.
2 Pretend to be on social media but don’t actually bother
80% of my strategy is this. See faking being on social media.
If we do need to use it, it seems that we should schedule regular cold turkey breaks. Lambert et al. (2022) suggests multi-day cold-turkey.
2.1 But that means I can get off social media?
Maybe. Grumpy bastard Scott Locklin summarises the fakebook extraction: Download your fakebook data. Delete your fakebook account. Delete any of your accounts.
Oh wait, your friends keep on using Facebook Messenger to organise their lives? FFS, friends.
4 Reduce distractions and upsells
Social media sites want to bombard you with extra stuff that it sounds like you should know about.
We can ameliorate social media addictiveness through browser tricks to manage distractions.
7 Incoming
safebook is Facebook without all the content. Soothing.