Name: 【TEDx】Quit social media | Dr. Cal Newport | TEDxTysons
Uploaded: 2017-06-16T17:11:07.000Z
Duration: 13 min 51 s
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Adverbs of manner

that right now, you're actually looking at something quite rare.

Transition words & phrases

Because I am a millennial computer scientist book author

and yet, I've never had a social media account.

How this happened was actually somewhat random.

Social media first came onto my radar when I was at college,

just as when Facebook arrived at our campus.

And at the time, which was right after the first dotcom bust,

I had had a dorm room business, I'd had to shut it down in the bust,

and then, suddenly, this other kid from Harvard, named Mark,

had this product called Facebook and people being excited about it.

So in sort of a fit of somewhat immature professional jealousy,

I said, "I'm not going to use this thing.

I'm not gonna help this kid's business; whatever it's going to amount to."

Soon as I go along my life, I look up not long later,

and I see everyone I know is really hooked on this thing.

when you have some objectivity, some perspective on it,

I realized this seems a little bit dangerous.

I've never had a social media account since.

So I'm here for two reasons; I want to deliver two messages.

is that even though I've never had a social media account,

I still know what's going on in the world;

I still collaborate with people all around the world,

I'm still regularly exposed serendipitously to interesting ideas,

and I rarely describe myself as lacking entertainment options.

So I've been OK, but I'd go even farther and say

not only I am OK without social media but I think I'm actually better off.

I think I'm happier, I think I find more sustainability in my life,

and I think I've been more successful professionally

is try to convince more of you to believe the same thing.

Let's see if I could actually convince more of you

that you too would be better off if you quit social media.

So, if the theme of this TEDx event is "Future Trends,"

I guess, in other words, this would be my vision of the future;

it would be one in which fewer people actually use social media.

That's a big claim, I think I need to back it up.

is take the three most common objections I hear

when I suggest to people that they quit social media,

and then for each of these objections, I'll try to defuse the hype

and see if I can actually push in some more reality.

This is the first most common objection I hear.

that's actually a hipster web developer down from 8th Street. I'm not sure.

Hipster or hermit? Sometimes it's hard to tell.

"Cal, social media is one of the fundamental technologies

To reject social media would be an act of extreme Luddism.

It would be like riding to work on a horse or using a rotary phone.

I can't take such a big stance in my life."

My reaction to that objection is I think that it's nonsense.

Social media is not a fundamental technology.

It leverages some fundamental technologies,

Which is to say, it's a source of entertainment,

The way that technologist Jaron Lanier puts it

is that these companies offer you shiny treats

in exchange for minutes of your attention and bites of your personal data,

So to say that you don't use social media should not be a large social stance,

it's just rejecting one form of entertainment for others.

There should be no more controversial than saying,

"I don't like newspapers, I like to get my news from magazines,"

or "I prefer to watch cable series, as I opposed to network television series."

It's not a major political or social stance

My use of the slot machine image up here also is not accidental

because if you look a little bit closer at these technologies,

it's not just that they're a source of entertainment

but they're a somewhat unsavory source of entertainment.

We now know that many of the major social media companies

hire individuals called "attention engineers"

who borrow principles from Las Vegas casino gambling,

to try to make these products as addictive as possible.

That is the desired use case of these products:

It's that you use it in an addictive fashion because that maximizes the profit

that can be extracted from your attention and data.

it's just a source of entertainment, one among many,

and it's somewhat unsavory if you look a little bit closer.

Here's the second common objection I hear

when I suggest that people quit social media.

because it is vital to my success in the 21st century economy.

If I do not have a well-cultivated social media brand,

people won't know who I am, people won't be able to find me,

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【TEDx】Quit social media | Dr. Cal Newport | TEDxTysons

perspective

anxiety

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