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With love and care, Prometheus molded humanity out of clay.
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But, humanity was weak, and they suffered greatly.
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To empower us in our struggle against nature, Prometheus stole a divine technology from
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the gods and gifted it to us: fire.
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Prometheus had defied the gods in service of humanity; he defied the strong to serve
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the weak.
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But defiance and change come at a price, and the powerful do not always submit without
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a fight.
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Prometheus was bound to a rock for eternity, where upon an eagle would descend upon him
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each day and eat his liver.
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In generation after generation, the spirit of Prometheus returns to us and brings us
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fire.
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Fire has the capacity to keep us warm and cook our food, but it also has capacity to
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create weapons and destroy us.
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We continually have to learn how to master it and use it carefully, or we risk self-destruction.
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In today's essay, we explore the latest reincarnation of this story: social media.
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Edward Lytton said that “the pen is mightier than the sword.”
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Ideas have a greater potental at changing the world than force.
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It's only in defence of our ideas, or our beliefs, that we choose to raise swords in
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the first place.
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For generations, ideas were limited to transmission by books.
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Books are limited in time and space.
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There's a limit to how fast they can spread ideas.
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But, the internet travels at the speed of light.
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The rate at which ideas can now spread is unprecedented.
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If the pen is mightier than the sword, is the internet mightier than the bomb?
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And, if ideas truly are more powerful than force, we should use them constructively and
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not destructively — in so far as that's possible.
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While the entirety of the internet is worth discussing, today we're going to be looking
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at a more basic, yet universal, aspect of it: social media.
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A report done by the Royal Society for Public Health states that social media usage is associated
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with increased rates of anxiety, depression, poor sleep quality, body image issues, and
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cyberbullying.
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In fact, rates of anxiety and depression in young people have increased by 70% in the
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last 25 years.
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Body image issues are a problem for both genders, but 9 in 10 teenage girls say that they are
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unhappy with their body.
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7 out of 10 teens have experienced cyberbullying and 37% say they experience it very frequently.
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The report found that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat have an overall negative effect
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on the well-being of the younger generation.
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For this reason, people are increasingly deciding to take a break from social media or walk
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away completely.
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The benefits are often not worth the costs.
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But, social media also helps us express ourselves, connect with others, and get access to high-quality
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information.
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Youtube, for example, was found to have a net positive effect on well-being and even
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help those who feel anxious, depressed, or lonely.
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Although, it still has its fair share of downsides.
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Social media also plays an important role in activism such as in the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
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Oppressive regimes often try to prevent and control the flow of information, so they can
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control the people.
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Social media can be leveraged to bypass this sort of totalitarian control.
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Whether you think social media is good or bad, you're right.
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It's a flame, and we're still learning to contain and master it.
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But, the current dialogue about social media is very low resolution.
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People shouldn't have to leave these revolutionary technologies behind, but they also shouldn't
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suffer negative impacts to their well-being by using them.
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Social media is often referred to as a tool, and it is.
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Tools are things that help us accomplish goals.
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But, this low-resolution comparison is actually pretty misleading.
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Social media is a tool, but it's not a tool in the same way a hammer is.
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It's much more like a city.
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Think about how much land there is on the Earth.
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But, we choose to live in relatively small areas of land called cities.
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A city is a high density container for social interactions; it allows us to get anything
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we need or want easier than we would if we had to do it alone.
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Cities are like living tools or organisms: they grow, evolve, and even die.
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Think about how many webpages there are on the worldwide web.
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But, we all choose to occupy a relatively small set of them called social media.
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Social media sites are also high density containers for social interactions.
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So, if we want to understand social media, we should start by understanding cities.
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A city is made up of two worlds: a world of ideas and a world of technology.
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The world of ideas is the world of culture.
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Culture contains stories, myths, or narratives that unite the people, describe what they
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value, and prescribe how to act.
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Take the founding myth of Rome for example.
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Most variations of the myth say that Romulus killed his own brother, Remus, in order to
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found Rome.
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One interpretation of this myth is that it's a reminder to the Romans that the glory of
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Rome is more important than even the love for your own brother.
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The world of ideas and values manifests itself in the technology of the city.
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The technology embodies the story and helps perpetuate it.
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Technology makes the story easier to live out.
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Growing up in Sparta would have been way different from growing up in Athens.
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In one, the highest ideal was the soldier.
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The entire city was designed to facilitate the achievement of this ideal.
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In the other, the highest ideal is something like the well-educated citizen, and the city
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was designed to faciliate the achievement of this ideal.
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Sparta might have had more barracks and training grounds, while Athens might have had more
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schools.
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Of course, it's likely that the true culture and technology of each city is more nuanced
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than I am making it out to be, but this is just to demonstrate a point: every city is
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built upon a story.
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Citizens that are born or live in that city learn this story, explicity or implicitly,
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so that they can grow and thrive.
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A good story is useful to us; it helps us act in a way that is beneficial.
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Technology makes certain actions easier.
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When certain actions become easier, the story they are a part of becomes more believable.
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The person who controls the story controls the people, and with the right technology,
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certain stories are easier to believe.
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If social media is a city, what story is it built on?
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If Sparta is designed to produce soldiers and Athens to produce well-educated citizens,
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what is social media designed to produce?
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I think the answer is the consumer.
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Social media tries to produce individuals who watch everything, read everything, and
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click on everything — that is their highest ideal.
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This story is probably best embodied in a technology you're familiar with: the newsfeed.
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Newsfeeds are designed to watch your interactions and maximize the amount of time you spend
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on them.
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They do this by adapting to you.
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To evolve, they continually have to give us novel stimuli and see how we react to it.
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In other words, they are always presenting us with the unknown.
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Humans have an interesting relationship with the unknown.
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We are drawn to it.
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We need to categorize it.
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The unknown always presents an opportunity for reward and growth, but it also presents
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an opportunity for punishment and death.
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You see, humans have an innate negativity bias.
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Negative things capture our attention more than positive things.
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This is because negative things can end us, while positive things can just make our lives
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better.
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Threatening things weigh heavier on our mind than the non-threatening.
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Because newsfeeds are optimized for attention, their default experience — over the long
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run — is often a negative one.
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When you're continually presented with new information, the negative and threatening
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stuff will always capture your attention more than the positive stuff.
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What people find threatening varies from person to person.
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You might focus on whether people are better looking than you, stronger than you, smarter
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than you, work harder, are more talented, or you may be drawn to fake news.
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Since we often spend more time analyzing and assessing threat, we pay more attention to
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it, and we get recommended similar things more and more on our newsfeeds.
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As a result, our newsfeeds often become vicious cycles of negativity and comparison interspersed
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with the occasional reward.
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So, how do we solve this problem?
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Because it was the only social medium shown to have a net-positive effect on the youth,
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I think we should look to YouTube for some answers.
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The one thing that I think makes YouTube vastly different from every other platform is its
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search capability.
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Before YouTube became the big social medium it is, it was first and foremost a search
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engine.
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In order to create a successful search engine, you have to take massive amounts of unorganized
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information and organize it.
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By doing this, YouTube made a much more ordered experience for us, the users.
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We could type in the thing we valued or the topic we were interested in and find a community
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based on that.
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I believe it's the amount of control that YouTube gives us over our experience that
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makes it more positive.
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We search for a topic that we're interested in and find a video that we like.
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We see that the channel that made it produces more content on that topic.
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We subscribe to that channel.
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We start to build a subscription feed that is purely based on our interests and values.
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Our newsfeed monitors our searches, subscriptions, and video history and offers us more recommendations
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based on that.
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The YouTube experience largely revolves around our interests and values.
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It gives us a lot more control in directing our attention from the start.
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You can always search new things, subscribe and unsubscribe, and restructure the whole
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experience around your new interests and values.
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The YouTube culture has always been about creating community.
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This is way different from every other social media because most of your connections on
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those platforms are based on location, school, work, or other random variables.
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The default experience on most other platforms is being told what to look at and the culture
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is often dominated by status and image.
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So, how can we apply this lesson to other social media platforms?
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Social media sites are digital cities.
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Their workers are like the governing bodies.
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And, as the citizens, I think we should have the tools to make digital homes.
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A digital home is an ordered experience that you've made for yourself based on your interests
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and values.
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It should be the default experience.
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When the chaotic novelty of newsfeeds are the default experience, without any tools
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to bring order to them, I argue that we'll always have a negative experience in the long
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run.
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Newsfeeds are designed to create consumers.
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A digital home would be designed to further your development.
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Let me give you an example of creating a digital home.
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On Twitter, I have everyone muted.
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My newsfeed is blank and useless.
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Instead, I have everyone organized into lists based on why I follow them.
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Some people I follow for art, some for philosophy, and some because their friends.
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The default experience when I log into Twitter isn't to have a bunch of things recommended
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to me based on what Twitter thinks will capture my attention, instead it's my choice to
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pick which list I want to read.
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The mute and list functions are incredibly powerful in bypassing the default newsfeed
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and constructing something like a digital home on Twitter.
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I think it's important to bypass the newsfeed as the default experience on every social
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media, as much as its possible, and focus on creating a digital home based on your interests
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and values.
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And, I think it's important that social media companies give us the tools to make
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this possible.
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Because, without these tools, we lose control, and without control, our attention no longer
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belongs
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to us.