A good read about this is The Chaos Machine from last year, mostly Facebook, but all of it
To write a concise response, I will say that I think social skills and social interactions have changed a lot. The sheer distance that digital communication can put between us, while making you feel "closer", the idea that a phone call has become like a rarity (in many cases), I think it's made a lot of people more neourotic, insecure, closed off, while all the while existing under the guise of transparency and positivity
The absurdity of reducing complex conversations down to 140 or less characters text messages or social media posts or even emoji's. Ever thought about sending a text message, only to realize you can't possibly get it under, lets say 5 sentences? Because that would look nuts. That's social media influence.
What the book really really hit on for me, was the idea that the entire system is flawed, because of how it works, on a basic level, it's not to make you smarter, or connect you, it's to drive engagement, and what drives engagement? Conflict. Anger. Division. it's the medium, not the message. It's not "evil", it's just about profits. Not anything else.
And this occurred to me even more sharply last week, the idea that social media/tech is just a slot machine, scrolling through people to date, scrolling though posts of your friends, scrolling through memes, waiting for that dopamine hit.
I don't do ANY of that, but still, just the concept of TEXTING has has that feature to it, right?
behavior now.
