Hello everybody, it's Will here, welcome back to the Waterstones vlog. This week
I'm probably taking my livelihood into our own hands because I'm going to be
talking to you about this book: Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media
Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier. Why, why am I talking to you about this
book given that I've been on social media for a decade now and it's been my
actual job for about three or four years now; why on earth would I encourage you
to read a book which asks you to delete your accounts right now. It is because
Jaron Lanier is a fascinating man, he's a sort of tech guru and visionary over
in America, the man who basically invented virtual reality as we know it.
He's an extraordinarily interesting man and I did actually get the chance to
interview him recently; I'm hoping that I will get those interviews ready for you
to hear by the time this goes out but if not keep an eye on our channels - do not
delete your accounts - and you will hear him talking about all sort of things.
He's a really fascinating man. Why has he written a book about social media? It is
because he feels that there is an inherent flaw in the system and in this
book he provides ten very clear arguments to explain his point and then
provides what he thinks is a potential solution to the problem. Now, on my proof
here we have the arguments very helpfully on the front and I'm just
gonna read them out because when you hear them I think that they will make a
lot of sense to anybody who's been on social media for any length of time and
you'll get an idea about how this book is structured.
Number one: You are losing your free will
Number two: Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times
Number three: Social media is making you into an asshole
Number four: social media is undermining truth
Number five: Social media is making what you say meaningless
Number six: Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy
Number seven: social media is making you unhappy
Number eight: social media doesn't want you to have economic dignity
Number nine: social media is making politics impossible
Number ten: social media hates your soul
When social media companies were set up
they didn't know what the unintended consequences were of some of the very
very basic ways in which the internet works in
when social media works. But the way that you will know if you're here on YouTube
and you're probably on other social media channels as well and you will know
that increasingly you are not deciding what you get to see in your feed or your
timeline, you're getting suggestions all of the time, you're getting adverts and
paid content and these companies provide their platforms for free but of course
they have to make money and they make that money through advertisers. And the
advertisers want the data. This is the data that you and I provide them with
every single day by using those services and of course they get lots of lovely
data because they get us addicted to the platform so that we keep using it.
The more we use it, the more data they get, the more useful that is to potential
advertisers. And what we're doing with that data, what we're giving them is
indications about how long we spend online, what we look at, how long we look
at it for, what we then look at next and crucially what is the path that we
follow before buying something. That's what they really want to know and if it
turns out that you tend to buy stuff when you're feeling a bit sad about
something that you've watched online then hey presto guess what's going to
happen? You're going to get shown some sad stuff in order to manipulate your
emotions, modify your behavior, so that you will then purchase. Now this all
sounds rather nefarious and it kind of is because this is a very clear
point that he makes in the book. He wants people to understand that these channels,
these social media channels are behavior modification tools. It's not just a
simple thing of putting up an advert as you used to do in a newspaper or a
magazine which is just for everybody to see and hope that people will buy your
thing. This is about targeted advertising based
on who you are, when you've been put in a group with other people with similar
behaviors and they will know that if the background to the advert is blue or red
it will have a better impact on you as a person because of all this stuff they
know about you as a group. And that's where it does start to get a little bit *creepy noise*
But for me personally, the thing that I find very difficult is the
negativity that can exist on a platform like Twitter for example. When
it first started it used to be like a really fun place where you could meet
people with similar interests and it was a great way for me to swap sort of
book recommendations and book chat and all the rest of it. And that still exists but
there is also this negativity that cuts through and he explains very clearly
here why there is this negativity, why there is this trend towards negativity
rather than positivity. And it's just simply because negative emotions are
quicker and when an algorithm is tracking what's going on it can see that
faster than it can... you'll know; if you meet somebody it takes time to build up trust
and to have a positive you know sort of feeling about people, it's much easier to
take immediate offense at something that somebody says and as you'll know if
you're on somewhere like Twitter there's a lot of immediate offence being taken
by people about all sorts of things. There's a great thing he talked about in
here which is called the BUMMER machine, that's an acronym, Behaviors of Users
Modified and Made into an Empire for Rent. That is his way of explaining how
social media systems work. So what's the solution to this problem? Well, one idea
that he suggests is that instead of having free platforms which means that
the money has to come from advertisers he suggests that maybe we could have a
paid-for platform, something like Netflix. If you had to pay a subscription to a
service, a social media service, and therefore it didn't have to make money
by selling your data to advertisers maybe that would be a slightly nicer
place to be. You pay your money and we might get something a bit like how
Netflix and Amazon Prime and HBO and things like that have helped to create
what people are calling peak TV, some of the best TV that's ever been made,
because you, the user, are paying for it; maybe if we pay for our social media
then we might get peak social media. It's an idea. Lots of really, really
fascinating stuff in this book and the thing I'm really taking away from it for
me personally, because I want to keep using social media and I want to keep
talking to people like you about the books that are fantastic and that I want
to recommend is maybe to be a bit more positive. To think really carefully about
what I'm sending out there to avoid negativity, to avoid controversy, I don't
mean to make everything bland but simply to communicate passion for books or
passion for what I'm talking about in a way that is inclusive rather than
divisive. That's my challenge, hey I make it your challenge too! Let's
make it a nice place to be. So there we go, that is Ten Arguments for Deleting
your Social Media Accounts Right Now which I kind of hope you won't do otherwise
this is goodbye and I don't want that to be the case. But I do think we can make
things better and it'd be really interesting to see what happens in the
future whether a paid-for social media platform ever comes into being; it's very
difficult of course because they're up against the might of Google, Facebook,
Twitter and all the rest of them. So let's see what happens but this is a
fascinating read for anybody who spends any amount of time on social media which
I'm guessing, that given you're watching this on a social media channel, is
probably you. Thank you for watching this week's vlog, I will be back in a few
weeks time, but until then take care - and don't delete your accounts right now.
Not right now. Bye