In the United States, ‘Digital media use has increased considerably, with the average 12th grader in 2016 spending more than twice as much time online as in 2006’ (Twenge et al., 2019: 329).

Distrust of existing tech institutions and separatist urges will always be part and parcel of decentralized social media

We can, and should, always strive to build better, more accessible, and more inclusive technology. But decentralizing the web into walled-off silos seems unlikely to accomplish this goal.

While social media emphasizes the show-off stuff — the vacation in Puerto Vallarta, the full kitchen remodel, the night out on the town — on blogs it still seems that people are sharing more than signalling.

The results showed that the group asked to reduce their social media use had an average 15% improvement in immune function, including fewer colds, flu, warts, and verrucae, a 50% improvement in sleep quality, and 30% fewer depressive symptoms.

Adolescents who spend more than 3 hours per day on social media may be at heightened risk for mental health problems, particularly internalizing problems.

In that time, public opinion shifted. People began to feel that tech companies were not just neutral hosts; they bore some responsibility for what their algorithms circulated.

Instagram was founded in 2010. The iPhone 4 was released then too—the first smartphone with a front-facing camera. In 2012 Facebook bought Instagram, and that’s the year that its user base exploded. By 2015, it was becoming normal for 12-year-old girls to spend hours each day taking selfies

Best times to post on social media overall: Tuesdays through Thursdays at 9 a.m. or 10 a.m. Best days to post on social media: Tuesdays through Thursdays Worst days to post on social media: Sundays

What social media platforms have done, though, thanks to their increasing market dominance and their emphasis on speed, is accelerate the decline of newspapers and other traditional news sources.

the veil of anonymity that platforms provide their users

very specific choices made by the companies that have come to dominate the internet generally and social media platforms in particular

There are some bugs in the software.

Russians could study and manipulate patterns in the engagement ranking system on a Facebook or YouTube.

sophisticated actors from political consultants to commercial interests, to intelligence arms of foreign powers can game platform algorithms

Twitter

talk radio and cable news

Twitter also surfaced a recent study from academics in France, Canada and the United States

Share responsibly. Much as it might depress you to think in such terms, you are an influencer within your own social network

What has changed, what remains the same, and what general patterns can be discerned from the past twenty years in the fast-changing field of edtech?

A second issue is that people who participate in a system of this time, since everything is free since it’s all being monetized, what reward can you get? Ultimately, this system creates assholes, because if being an asshole gets you attention, that’s exactly what you’re going to do. Because there’s a bias for negative emotions to work better in engagement, because the attention economy brings out the asshole in a lot of other people, the people who want to disrupt and destroy get a lot more efficiency for their spend than the people who might be trying to build up and preserve and improve.

The behaviorists got pretty far in understanding the kinds of algorithms that can change people. They found that noisy feedback works better than consistent feedback. That means that if you’re pressing the button to get your treat, and once in a while it doesn’t work, it actually engages your mind even more —  it makes you more obsessive, whether you’re a rat, or a dog, or a person.

So if you zoom ahead to the 1950s or so, Norbert Wiener, one of the founders of computer science after Alan Turing and Jon van Neumann, wrote a book called 'The Human Use of Human Beings,' and in that book he points out that a computer (which at that time was a very new and exotic device that only existed in a few laboratories) could take the role of the human researcher in one of these experiments. So, if you had a computer that was reading information about what a person did and then providing stimulus, you could condition that person and change their behavior in a predictable way. He was saying that computers could turn out to have incredible social consequences. There’s an astonishing passage at the end of 'The Human Use of Human Beings' in which he says, “The thing about this book is that this hypothetical might seem scary, but in order for it to happen, there’d have to be some sort of global computing capacity with wireless links to every single person on earth who keeps some kind of device on their person all the time and obviously this is impossible.”

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we’re both so focused on what the other is saying or doing that’s wrong that we barely hear anything else. There may have been a time when we might listen to what the other has to say politely, but those days are long gone.

gossip, which some attribute to the need to stay abreast of news among friends and family as our social networks expanded.

Distractions arrive in your brain connected to people you know (or think you know), which is the genius of social, peer-to-peer media.