Why Some Biologists and Ecologists Think Social Media is a Risk to Humanity

upstart writes:

Why some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity:

One of the real challenges that we're facing is that we don't have a lot of information

Social media has drastically restructured the way we communicate in an incredibly short period of time. We can discover, Like," click on, and share information faster than ever before, guided by algorithms most of us don't quite understand.

And while some social scientists, journalists, and activists have been raising concerns about how this is affecting our democracy, mental health, and relationships, we haven't seen biologists and ecologists weighing in as much.

That's changed with a new paper published in the prestigious science journal PNAS earlier this month, titled Stewardship of global collective behavior."

Seventeen researchers who specialize in widely different fields, from climate science to philosophy, make the case that academics should treat the study of technology's large-scale impact on society as a crisis discipline." A crisis discipline is a field in which scientists across different fields work quickly to address an urgent societal problem - like how conservation biology tries to protect endangered species or climate science research aims to stop global warming.

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