Over the last year, I’ve found myself losing interest in social media…
I haven’t completely given up on it yet, but I’m finding that I spend less and less time on social networks. This decline for me has been driven by a number of factors, including Facebook’s complicity in hijacking the 2016 election, Twitter’s introduction of an algorithm to filter newsfeeds, Facebook’s security breaches and insensitivity to user data, and all the ways in which most social media platforms are constantly grappling for our attention.
Here are a list of books that I have found to be helpful and that highlight one or more of these critiques:
Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy
Siva Vaidhyanathan
If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine respectable journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook. Of course, none of that was part of the plan. In this fully updated paperback edition of Antisocial Media, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life just a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging. It’s an account of the hubris of good intentions, a missionary spirit, and an ideology that sees computer code as the universal solvent for all human problems. And it’s an indictment of how “social media” has fostered the deterioration of democratic culture around the world, from facilitating Russian meddling in support of Trump’s election to the exploitation of the platform by murderous authoritarians in Burma and the Philippines. Both authoritative and trenchant, Antisocial Media shows how Facebook’s mission went so wrong.
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