Social Media Is Horrible

Snapchat This is the worst offender. My daughters Alora & Brittan love it, but it's like texting that disappears. So we're encouraging habitual forgetting? And those images and messages don't really go away. You just lose access to them. Snapchat keeps them on their servers, forever. Cara got into the fun of the filters that include placenames for a while, so I followed her back onto the app before we left for Europe. I still don't like it. It's frustrating and I find myself screenshotting everything the kids send me, which is apparently bad form. But don't take it from me. Here's Mark Cuban explaining why downloading Snapchat is a huge mistake. Facebook Facebook is the app your parents are on. It's where they get information because you don't call anymore. Facebook also has an army of the brightest people in the world trying to manipulate you into staying on the app for as long as they can. Notifications draw you back in and you wake up out of a daze hours later not knowing where the time went. It is personalized, curated, and optimized to manipulate you. It's been years since I had the app on my phone and I try to stay off of it, letting my tweeting feed into it for all those older relatives who enjoy it. Cara still uses it extensizely, so sometimes I'll get drawn back in. Facebook Messanger is, however, one of the better apps for international communication. Since it's always a one on one conversation though, Facebook can do a lot less to draw you in and I'm not sure how they're monetizing it becasue I don't see ads either. Instagram Facebook owns Instagram. I thought about going back to it when I went to a family reunion and everyone under 30 said they used it "instead" of Facebook. But why do I need to keep up with another app? I don't. I recently read about how avant garde Amalia Ulman is storming the art world with her photographic creations released in the app. That's how they draw you in. LinkedIn When I joined LinkedIn in 2008 it was invite only and it led me landing a job at Experian. I maintain a LinkedIn profile because in the professional world it's now expected of me. It hasn't been useful in a job search since 2008, but the recruiter spam I get in the app has certainly increased over time. Recruiters shell out thousands per year per seat for the power to see, search and connect with you. They are the customers. We are the product. No wonder Microsoft bought them. Twitter I love Twitter. If you know me you probably already know that about me. Twitter makes me dumber. Twitter makes me less able to communicate in long form, as my thoughts try to conform to expression in the 140 character constraint. When I first started using Twitter I noticed how profoundly diminished my conversational ability was because of it. But that was before social media went mainstream. It has changed the way everyone interacts. Twitter pushes curation just like Facebook, to show you only posts that are more likely to keep you in the app so they can show you ads. Twitter, however, tells you when they're doing it and let's you opt out. Increasingly though I have to opt out every time I open the app anew. Their stock price is flagging, so it's understandable and inevitable they'll follow the master manipulators at Facebook further down that dark path. Pokémon Go How can this be on the list you might wonder? There is no in-app communication between users. You can't trade or chat or anything. Cara got me playing Pokémon Go (seeing a pattern yet of the curmudgeon being drug into the future by hiw tech savvy wife?) and we've taken more long walks together since then than at any other period in our lives. You can pick out the other people playing the game pretty easily, and we talk to eachother - random strangers at the park. The conversations are driven by the app just like any other social media, but not confined to the screen because Pokémon Go is the first truly mainstream virtual reality. So how is that horrible? I now see the world through the eyes of the app. Could that sculpture be a pokéstop? Are there any gyms nearby? What's at that restuarant? Nothing? This one has a pokéstop, let's go there. And we are twain from those not playing, who now live outside our world despite being all around us.