I came across an interesting blog post on Catusdan’s Blog titled Social Media Still Left its Mark After I Got Rid of it. There is no shortage of social media-critical content (including here on The New Leaf Journal), but there is a shortage of interesting content on the subject (the same can be said of social media itself). This post contained an interesting insight on social media:
This is the … way that social media wastes your time. By breaking up the commitment to each piece of content into intervals of a couple of seconds, you can blast through massives amounts of time before you know it.
This is true. Social media provides an endless stream of short-form content, but the format is not conducive to meangful content or meaningful engagement with content. I discussed the structural flaws of social media in a recent post on the Fediverse. One of the most important things to be wary of on the internet – whether one is browsing Twitter, checking deals on Amazon, or flipping through articles on Wikipedia – is content that is designed to short-circuit one’s attention span and simplify things that would otherwise be worth engaging with to the point of meaninglessness.
These are topics I will explore in future posts. For now, I encourage you to read the full social media article on Cactusdan’s Blog.