Filling the void

- book mainly about why we use social media - social media consumption is hedonistic like drugs or junk food - do my rather passive social media usage say something relevant about me? - negative effects of using socials improve _quickly_ after stopping using them - warm color/black-white dimming as a "show must go on" rather than "turn me off now" - _many of us love to hate social media_ - social media does not make us feel lonely, loneliness makes us turn to them - lazy thinking is that social media is changing us -> that leads to technological determinism i.e. we're being doomed - if we believe in technological determinism[[random#^1c5de7]], we lose control of our behavior and we let silicon valley brogrammes to be in charge, but as we think with our brains we can and should do better - when someone excessively uses social media it is that person's fault or the platforms are to blame due to abusing human vulnerability? - contradiction between technological determinism & individual responsibility - those uninterested if international affairs are still affected by war, the same applies to those not on social media - it's hard to hide or shy away from them - how come a tool (social media) brings pleasure while other tools are just pleasure free? - _self-control as a depletable resource_ - we post because there's a chance others can see what we post - affect can be thought of as a supercategory to which emotion belongs to - timeline gives a form of emotional distraction that is pleasing to a given user and enables emotion regulation - _emotion is everything in timeline-based media - that's what makes us return back every 10 minutes_ - one of the strangest affects of using the timeline is anticipation of what's coming - "food porn" is the ultimate combination of hedonic pleasures - book 'Our brain on porn' says Facebok is not far from porn - "Dopamine is your motivation and drive to pursue potential pleasures & long-term goals" - "The drive to achieve social status is dopamine driven" - dopamine surges for novelty - new cars, gear, instafeed, porn, ... - doomscrolling is the new channel flicking - 4 essential qualities of a timeline: 1. composed of familiar sources 2. abundance 3. mixture - custom built media experience 4. novelty - promise of unpredictability - _timeline is addictive hosepipe for comodified culture available 24/7_ - _variable schedule reinforcment_ - technique originally used for training animals to enforce behavior by variable rewards - technologies are a reflection of the cultures in which they are used, not the other way round - digital quantification (FB friends, Airbnb rating, ...) are often performative; despite having 150 real friends, people tend to only reach out to 5 friends when in need - industrialisation and transition to the postmodern life makes isolation worse - two types of hapiness - hedonic - short-term - eudaimonic - more long-term - if people are craving/hungry/horny/..., it is way easier to sell them whatever they crave - you can't just opt-out parts of capitalism you don't like (twitter, coca-cola) because they are still in your life - the most dangerous version of how our relationships with capital are obfuscated is when you don't realize you're being part of the exchange at all - "Just do it" / "Life tastes good" / "Think different" slogans aim at fulfilling our primary needs - _going public is a bold statement saying your ultimate goal is to make money_ - being on the cover of Wall-street Journal is just bad :) - the other time people were being sad other than in attention economy was during slavery - the more products become synonymous to things in your life (e.g. "To google something") the harder it is to abandon them - _if you're using Facebook's SSO, you can't leave Facebook because you'd loose associated accounts_ - Orson Welles: "We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone" - everything else is just an illusion - Does Facebook care that you exercise your democratic duty or it cares about you sharing you did vote via its interface? - extracting surplus value from causing emotional distress seems to be a dead-end of humanity - media & culture have been comodified into 'content' - social media as a reconfiguration of web that makes consumption as easy & appealing as possible - _feeling of emptiness/uncertainty/stagnation that feels can only be escaped by participating in various forms of enjoyment & consumption_ - which (probably not only) corporations are happy to provide - _consumption/hedonism as a failed attempt to resist capitalism_ - two possible modal changes - enclosure - from public -> private - e.g. paywalls - commons - from private -> public - e.g. reclaiming public spaces - cloud can be seen as a form of enclosure - beware of losing copyright when uploading content - Tim Berners-Lee only announced web in 1991 - also he was agains allowing transfering images because he was afraid of porn overhaul - social media ~ fried food - "There's no such thing as a harmless, clean, unilateral use of social media, if you use them to any degree, they will use you too"