Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier – review
Many of the ideas in Jaron Lanier's new book start off pretty familiar - at least, if you are active on social media. Yet in every chapter there is a principle so elegant, so neat, sometimes even so beautiful, that what is billed as straight polemic becomes something much more profound.
The concept of random reinforcement, for example: addiction fed not by reward but by never knowing whether or when the reward will come, is well known. But Lanier puts it like this: "The algorithm is trying to capture the perfect parameters for manipulating a brain, while the brain, in order to seek out deeper meaning, is changing in response to the algorithm's experiments " Because the stimuli from the algorithm doesn't mean anything, because they genuinely are random, the brain isn't responding to anything real, but to a fiction. That process - of becoming hooked on an elusive mirage - is addiction."
Continue reading...