Introduction
A few years ago, Jaron Lanier wrote Ten Arguments to Delete your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Lanier’s book has the helpful feature of being completely unambiguous in its message (when, Jaron, when should I delete them? Oh). I ended up assigning it as optional reading for my undergraduate class, Bubbles. The Thanksgiving break means that students usually patch out that week and miss class, so I run an optional seminar instead. I’ve learned a huge amount from these little liminal-moment seminars each year, and some of them have led to real revisions in my own thinking, see, e.g., my views on University censorship when I was on Jim Rutt’s Currents podcast. In previous years, we read John Locke’s pluralistic Letter Concerning Toleration, but Lanier’s book has the advantage of not needing any coaching in close-reading.
That year the near-unanimous response from the students was to reject the book. Only one student (of ten, or so) had sympathy with the view, and wrote a fascinating (again, optional) essay later that semester. I was surprised by the support the students had for their lives on social media, and while a few of them felt that being on Facebook (or similar Facebook-owned systems) wasn’t quite optional, they felt the benefits outweighed the downsides.
Of course, I didn’t follow Lanier’s prescription either. I had deleted my Facebook account a year beforehand, but had an active Twitter habit. While I felt Lanier’s arguments were dead-on they were not, as the philosophers, say, dispositive: they didn’t settle the matter for me.
— source simondedeo.com | Simon DeDeo | 25 Apr 2021