Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • With love and care, Prometheus molded humanity out of clay.

  • But, humanity was weak, and they suffered greatly.

  • To empower us in our struggle against nature, Prometheus stole a divine technology from

  • the gods and gifted it to us: fire.

  • Prometheus had defied the gods in service of humanity; he defied the strong to serve

  • the weak.

  • But defiance and change come at a price, and the powerful do not always submit without

  • a fight.

  • Prometheus was bound to a rock for eternity, where upon an eagle would descend upon him

  • each day and eat his liver.

  • In generation after generation, the spirit of Prometheus returns to us and brings us

  • fire.

  • Fire has the capacity to keep us warm and cook our food, but it also has capacity to

  • create weapons and destroy us.

  • We continually have to learn how to master it and use it carefully, or we risk self-destruction.

  • In today's essay, we explore the latest reincarnation of this story: social media.

  • Edward Lytton said thatthe pen is mightier than the sword.”

  • Ideas have a greater potental at changing the world than force.

  • It's only in defence of our ideas, or our beliefs, that we choose to raise swords in

  • the first place.

  • For generations, ideas were limited to transmission by books.

  • Books are limited in time and space.

  • There's a limit to how fast they can spread ideas.

  • But, the internet travels at the speed of light.

  • The rate at which ideas can now spread is unprecedented.

  • If the pen is mightier than the sword, is the internet mightier than the bomb?

  • And, if ideas truly are more powerful than force, we should use them constructively and

  • not destructivelyin so far as that's possible.

  • While the entirety of the internet is worth discussing, today we're going to be looking

  • at a more basic, yet universal, aspect of it: social media.

  • A report done by the Royal Society for Public Health states that social media usage is associated

  • with increased rates of anxiety, depression, poor sleep quality, body image issues, and

  • cyberbullying.

  • In fact, rates of anxiety and depression in young people have increased by 70% in the

  • last 25 years.

  • Body image issues are a problem for both genders, but 9 in 10 teenage girls say that they are

  • unhappy with their body.

  • 7 out of 10 teens have experienced cyberbullying and 37% say they experience it very frequently.

  • The report found that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat have an overall negative effect

  • on the well-being of the younger generation.

  • For this reason, people are increasingly deciding to take a break from social media or walk

  • away completely.

  • The benefits are often not worth the costs.

  • But, social media also helps us express ourselves, connect with others, and get access to high-quality

  • information.

  • Youtube, for example, was found to have a net positive effect on well-being and even

  • help those who feel anxious, depressed, or lonely.

  • Although, it still has its fair share of downsides.

  • Social media also plays an important role in activism such as in the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

  • Oppressive regimes often try to prevent and control the flow of information, so they can

  • control the people.

  • Social media can be leveraged to bypass this sort of totalitarian control.

  • Whether you think social media is good or bad, you're right.

  • It's a flame, and we're still learning to contain and master it.

  • But, the current dialogue about social media is very low resolution.

  • People shouldn't have to leave these revolutionary technologies behind, but they also shouldn't

  • suffer negative impacts to their well-being by using them.

  • Social media is often referred to as a tool, and it is.

  • Tools are things that help us accomplish goals.

  • But, this low-resolution comparison is actually pretty misleading.

  • Social media is a tool, but it's not a tool in the same way a hammer is.

  • It's much more like a city.

  • Think about how much land there is on the Earth.

  • But, we choose to live in relatively small areas of land called cities.

  • A city is a high density container for social interactions; it allows us to get anything

  • we need or want easier than we would if we had to do it alone.

  • Cities are like living tools or organisms: they grow, evolve, and even die.

  • Think about how many webpages there are on the worldwide web.

  • But, we all choose to occupy a relatively small set of them called social media.

  • Social media sites are also high density containers for social interactions.

  • So, if we want to understand social media, we should start by understanding cities.

  • A city is made up of two worlds: a world of ideas and a world of technology.

  • The world of ideas is the world of culture.

  • Culture contains stories, myths, or narratives that unite the people, describe what they

  • value, and prescribe how to act.

  • Take the founding myth of Rome for example.

  • Most variations of the myth say that Romulus killed his own brother, Remus, in order to

  • found Rome.

  • One interpretation of this myth is that it's a reminder to the Romans that the glory of

  • Rome is more important than even the love for your own brother.

  • The world of ideas and values manifests itself in the technology of the city.

  • The technology embodies the story and helps perpetuate it.

  • Technology makes the story easier to live out.

  • Growing up in Sparta would have been way different from growing up in Athens.

  • In one, the highest ideal was the soldier.

  • The entire city was designed to facilitate the achievement of this ideal.

  • In the other, the highest ideal is something like the well-educated citizen, and the city

  • was designed to faciliate the achievement of this ideal.

  • Sparta might have had more barracks and training grounds, while Athens might have had more

  • schools.

  • Of course, it's likely that the true culture and technology of each city is more nuanced

  • than I am making it out to be, but this is just to demonstrate a point: every city is

  • built upon a story.

  • Citizens that are born or live in that city learn this story, explicity or implicitly,

  • so that they can grow and thrive.

  • A good story is useful to us; it helps us act in a way that is beneficial.

  • Technology makes certain actions easier.

  • When certain actions become easier, the story they are a part of becomes more believable.

  • The person who controls the story controls the people, and with the right technology,

  • certain stories are easier to believe.

  • If social media is a city, what story is it built on?

  • If Sparta is designed to produce soldiers and Athens to produce well-educated citizens,

  • what is social media designed to produce?

  • I think the answer is the consumer.

  • Social media tries to produce individuals who watch everything, read everything, and

  • click on everythingthat is their highest ideal.

  • This story is probably best embodied in a technology you're familiar with: the newsfeed.

  • Newsfeeds are designed to watch your interactions and maximize the amount of time you spend

  • on them.

  • They do this by adapting to you.

  • To evolve, they continually have to give us novel stimuli and see how we react to it.

  • In other words, they are always presenting us with the unknown.

  • Humans have an interesting relationship with the unknown.

  • We are drawn to it.

  • We need to categorize it.

  • The unknown always presents an opportunity for reward and growth, but it also presents

  • an opportunity for punishment and death.

  • You see, humans have an innate negativity bias.

  • Negative things capture our attention more than positive things.

  • This is because negative things can end us, while positive things can just make our lives

  • better.

  • Threatening things weigh heavier on our mind than the non-threatening.

  • Because newsfeeds are optimized for attention, their default experienceover the long

  • runis often a negative one.

  • When you're continually presented with new information, the negative and threatening

  • stuff will always capture your attention more than the positive stuff.

  • What people find threatening varies from person to person.

  • You might focus on whether people are better looking than you, stronger than you, smarter

  • than you, work harder, are more talented, or you may be drawn to fake news.

  • Since we often spend more time analyzing and assessing threat, we pay more attention to

  • it, and we get recommended similar things more and more on our newsfeeds.

  • As a result, our newsfeeds often become vicious cycles of negativity and comparison interspersed

  • with the occasional reward.

  • So, how do we solve this problem?

  • Because it was the only social medium shown to have a net-positive effect on the youth,

  • I think we should look to YouTube for some answers.

  • The one thing that I think makes YouTube vastly different from every other platform is its

  • search capability.

  • Before YouTube became the big social medium it is, it was first and foremost a search

  • engine.

  • In order to create a successful search engine, you have to take massive amounts of unorganized

  • information and organize it.

  • By doing this, YouTube made a much more ordered experience for us, the users.

  • We could type in the thing we valued or the topic we were interested in and find a community

  • based on that.

  • I believe it's the amount of control that YouTube gives us over our experience that

  • makes it more positive.

  • We search for a topic that we're interested in and find a video that we like.

  • We see that the channel that made it produces more content on that topic.

  • We subscribe to that channel.

  • We start to build a subscription feed that is purely based on our interests and values.

  • Our newsfeed monitors our searches, subscriptions, and video history and offers us more recommendations

  • based on that.

  • The YouTube experience largely revolves around our interests and values.

  • It gives us a lot more control in directing our attention from the start.

  • You can always search new things, subscribe and unsubscribe, and restructure the whole

  • experience around your new interests and values.

  • The YouTube culture has always been about creating community.

  • This is way different from every other social media because most of your connections on

  • those platforms are based on location, school, work, or other random variables.

  • The default experience on most other platforms is being told what to look at and the culture

  • is often dominated by status and image.

  • So, how can we apply this lesson to other social media platforms?

  • Social media sites are digital cities.

  • Their workers are like the governing bodies.

  • And, as the citizens, I think we should have the tools to make digital homes.

  • A digital home is an ordered experience that you've made for yourself based on your interests

  • and values.

  • It should be the default experience.

  • When the chaotic novelty of newsfeeds are the default experience, without any tools

  • to bring order to them, I argue that we'll always have a negative experience in the long

  • run.

  • Newsfeeds are designed to create consumers.

  • A digital home would be designed to further your development.

  • Let me give you an example of creating a digital home.

  • On Twitter, I have everyone muted.

  • My newsfeed is blank and useless.

  • Instead, I have everyone organized into lists based on why I follow them.

  • Some people I follow for art, some for philosophy, and some because their friends.

  • The default experience when I log into Twitter isn't to have a bunch of things recommended

  • to me based on what Twitter thinks will capture my attention, instead it's my choice to

  • pick which list I want to read.

  • The mute and list functions are incredibly powerful in bypassing the default newsfeed

  • and constructing something like a digital home on Twitter.

  • I think it's important to bypass the newsfeed as the default experience on every social

  • media, as much as its possible, and focus on creating a digital home based on your interests

  • and values.

  • And, I think it's important that social media companies give us the tools to make

  • this possible.

  • Because, without these tools, we lose control, and without control, our attention no longer

  • belongs

  • to us.

With love and care, Prometheus molded humanity out of clay.

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it