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Our race to the bottom on social media
It’ll take you down if you don’t pay attention or, for that matter, if you do
Rather than post a link to this article I’d like you to read — which may be a Medium no-no anyway — let me just give you the title and the author’s name: “How the Internet Turned Us into Content Machines” by Kyle Chayka.
It’s in the current New Yorker, and you can consume it for free if you’ve not read there much this month. You get several reads on the house per month before you hit the paywall.
Chayak reviews two new books that “examine how social media traps users in a brutal race to the bottom,” the bottom defined as its encouraging, even demanding, the endless production of largely vapid content.
The books are Content by Kate Eichhorn and The Internet Are Not What You Think It Is by Justin E.H. Smith.
Medium is not the same as Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, of course, but my experience of attempting to “play” Medium for the past few months persuades me to believe the same dynamic is at work to some extent. Correct me if I am wrong, but I think it tempts you, at the very least, to write a different way than you would naturally — and even choose the topics you write about with different intentions.
