Stephen

“A 2015 study looked into the reasons why people who try to quit the social industry fail.21 The survey data came from a group of people who had signed up to quit Facebook for just ninety-nine days. Many of these determined quitters couldn’t even make the first few days. And many of those who successfully quit had access to another social networking site, like Twitter, so that they had simply displaced their addiction. Those who stayed away, however, were typically in a happier frame of mind, and less interested in controlling how other people thought of them, thus implying that social media addiction is partly a self-medication for depression and partly a way of curating a better self in the eyes of others. Indeed, these two factors may not be unrelated.”
― Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine

“The city, by storm light, looked far too malevolent. There were things he could recognize – columns and steps and archways and so on – but there were others . . . he shuddered. It looked as if people had once tried to add human touches to structures that were already ancient . . .”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“For those who are curating a self, social media notifications work as a form of clickbait.22 Notifications light up the ‘reward centres’ of the brain, so that we feel bad if the metrics we accumulate on our different platforms don’t express enough approval. The addictive aspect of this is similar to the effect of poker machines or smartphone games, recalling what cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han calls the ‘gamification of capitalism’.”
― Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine

“Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job.”
― Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures