The purpose of a writing class is to develop a meaningful thesis, direct or implied, that will generate a compelling essay. Most importantly, a meaningful thesis will have a strong emotional connection between you and the material. In fact, if you don’t have a “fire in your belly” to write the paper, your essay will be nothing more than a limp document, a perfunctory exercise in futility. A successful thesis will also be intellectually challenging and afford a complexity worthy of college-level writing. Thirdly, the successful thesis will be demonstrable, which means it can be supported by examples and illustrations in a recognizable organizational design.
Other Website: http://herculodge.typepad.com/
More Essay Strategies for Deleting Social Media Accounts Essay Due March 30, 2020
Writing Question: Using Your Homework to Support Your Essay's Thesis
Can I as a student use my homework assignments for my introduction and/or body paragraphs of my essay?
The answer is yes.
Writing Strategy:
Introduction Paragraph 1:
Summarize Lacey's "nosedive" in the "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror.
Or summarize Andrew Sullivan's "nosedive" in his essay "I Used to be Human Being."
Or summarize the "nosedive" of someone you know who got addicted to social media.
Or summarize social media addiction as described in any Tristan Harris or Sherry Turkle video of your choosing.
Or summarize Jaron Lanier's central argument in his book.
Thesis Paragraph 2:
Argue that Jaron Lanier has made a persuasive case that the existence of "BUMMER" in social media compels us to at the very least delete our social media use by 90% or outright eliminate it.
Paragraph 3:
Paragraph 3 based on your first Lanier homework assignment: Read Lanier pages 1-39 and in 200-word paragraph explain how social media destroys free will.
Paragraph 4:
Paragraph 4 based on your second homework assignment: Read pages 39-76 and in a 200-word paragraph explain how social media makes us terrible versions of ourselves. Lanier is referring to the "A Factor."
Paragraph 5: Another characteristic of BUMMER.
Paragraph 6: Another characteristic of BUMMER.
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-Rebuttal
Here are some common counterarguments:
"No one is holding a gun to your head and saying you need to be on social media."
"Social media has connected me to family and friends in ways that otherwise would be impossible."
"You show me extreme cases, but for every pathological social media addict I can show you dozens of well-adjusted mentally healthy people who use social media."
Conclusion Paragraph 8
Write an emotionally powerful restatement of your thesis.
McMahon’s “Secret” Refutation Essay Outline
Agree or disagree with the claim that we should delete our social media accounts based on the following evidence:
One. Social media is an addiction trap by design that hijacks our brains.
Two. Social media brings forth our worst version of ourselves.
Three. Social media encourages tribalism and alternative realities.
Four. Social media spreads weaponized misinformation.
Five. In its "race to the bottom" to get clickbait, social media erodes liberal democracies around the world.
Six. Social media encourages us to give up our private data until we have submitted all our privacy, and this surrender will result to a loss of individual rights and freedoms.
Paragraphs 3-6
Choose 4 of the above points to address in your body paragraphs.
Counterargument-Rebuttal Paragraph 7
Find a defense of social media and write a rebuttal of it.
Here are some common counterarguments:
"No one is holding a gun to your head and saying you need to be on social media."
"Social media has connected me to family and friends in ways that otherwise would be impossible."
"You show me extreme cases, but for every pathological social media addict I can show you dozens of well-adjusted mentally healthy people who use social media."
Conclusion Paragraph 8
Write an emotionally powerful restatement of your thesis.
McMahon’s “Secret” Refutation Essay Outline
Paragraph 1: Summarize Tristan Harris’ YouTube video “How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds everyday,” and address the power of the few over the many; the race to the bottom, the outrage machine making clicks, the loss of free agency (free will), the destruction of democracy, the addiction that is baked in the social media landscape, the attention economy, etc.
Paragraph 2: Pivot to Jaron Lanier’s claim that we should delete our social media accounts and then argue that deleting one’s account isn’t the solution and provide reasons for your thesis. These reasons will be your supporting paragraphs.
Some reasons I covered in class:
One. Only mindful people will delete their accounts. This won’t be a game-changer because the majority “Homer Simpsons” won’t heed Harris’ or Lanier’s warnings.
Two. Saying that something is addicting so it should be eliminated from our life is a weak argument. Lots of things are addicting: TV, German chocolate cake, wine, relationships, etc. Moderation, not abstinence, is the more reasonable response.
Three. Disciplined use of social media can be valuable for business, communicating with loved ones who are far away, engaging in meaningful political causes, etc.
Four. Reducing one’s social media by over 90% is probably reasonable.
Five. Time-blocking one’s day is more reasonable than deleting all of one’s social media accounts.
Six. One should have a healthy contempt for social media because the diagnosis of its vileness by Harris and Lanier is accurate, but a healthy contempt doesn’t necessarily translate into deleting one’s accounts. As said earlier, a 90% reduction or more is more reasonable unless you’re hopelessly addicted.
Notice there is no counterargument-rebuttal because the WHOLE essay is a counterargument-rebuttal. This is called a refutation essay.
Conclusion is a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Three Sample Thesis Statements That Address the Argument That We Must Delete Our Social Media Accounts
Overview of the Essay Topic
Essay Assignment
For a 1,000-word essay, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now) claim that social media compromises personal excellence, degrades one’s core humanity, and accelerates the disintegration of democracy.
How does social media in the smartphone age hijack our freedom and autonomy and work against our best interests?
Sample Thesis #1
Jaron Lanier makes the persuasive case that social media must be deleted because it is a portable crack machine that enslaves us to addiction, compromises our individuality by turning us into tribalistic conformists, makes us “race to the bottom” for attention, and encourages us to surrender our private data to Big Business.
Supports
The following should be considered for your body paragraphs (mapping components of a thesis):
One. Social media is now a portable crack machine that puts us inside a dopamine feedback loop resulting in a gradual behavior modification and addiction that can entrap even the smartest, most disciplined individuals because the addictive nature of social media is not a bug; it's a feature. Social media exists so that we give up our autonomy.
Two. When we are addicted to anything, including social media's intermittent rewards, we become a nastier, meaner, dumber version of ourselves.
Three. Because we are tribalists, we are vulnerable to social anxiety and social status as it pertains to our social media interactions. Long-term social media immersion results in anxiety and eventually into acute depression.
Four. Not only do we become addicted; our addiction makes us willing participants in our own submission to data mining so that we are the product of the social media companies who sell our most private date to other business entities without our knowledge and consent.
Five. Social media by its very nature tends toward fakery, manipulation, propaganda, and "fake news" because in grabbing attention from the reptilian part of our brains, social media is in a "race to the bottom" to get outrage. This sense of outrage is essential for maximizing clickbait and revenue for the social media companies.
Six. As we adapt to the "race to the bottom," we become more polarized as a society and this polarization degrades democracy while strengthening fascism and totalitarianism.
Facebook and Google. The more a company uses BUMMER the more it attracts trolls like Russian operatives trying to destroy democracies around the world.
Sample Thesis #2
Jaron Lanier makes a compelling case that we must delete our social media accounts because immersing ourselves in the social media ecosystem brings out our Inner Demon through selfish addiction, wolf pack behavior (joining Outrage Machine and Cancel Culture), and attention-getting fakery, which becomes “a race to the bottom.”
Supports
One. How does Lanier compare the A*** Personality Factor to drug addiction?
Social media leads to addiction, which leads to radical personality change. To become an addict is for a normal person to lose her best self to her monster self.
The addict is in a constant state of neediness and deprivation, looking for the next hit. Smartphone nation is a nation of addicts.
Addiction is about selfishness.
The addict “is always deprived, rushing for affirmation.” He is nervous, “compulsively pecking at his situation.” He is selfish, self-absorbed, and too “wrapped-up” in his addictive cycle to have empathy for others (39).
Addicts succumb to a “personal mythology of grandiosity.” This grandeur speaks to their colossal insecurity.
Social media addicts are aggressive: They victimize others and they play the victim.
Social media addicts become competitive trolls trying to “win points” in arguments and become more and more belligerent.
Lanier notices when he was a prominent blogger at Huffpost he received a torrent of belligerent emails. He noticed manipulation and a prominent phony AH Factor, the result of personalities conforming to online addiction.
Of all the arguments against social media, this is the one that he is most emotional and “visceral” about.
How Social Media Creates A***
Simple syllogism: A*** get the most attention. Social media creates attention addiction. Therefore, social media creates A***.
Two. What is Solitary/Pack switch?
Lanier says we all have an inner troll. The troll is the pack wolf. We are more happy and more free as the solitary wolf.
But social media makes us pack wolves.
We all have a Solitary/Pack switch for our inner wolf.
Social media flips the Pack switch on. We become obsessed with our ranking in the wolf pack. Where we stand in our social hierarchy is our everything, so much that we lose contact with reality. Loyalty to the pack becomes more important than any adherence to reality, so if our pack denies climate change, we deny climate change to the death.
If our pack supports a racist politician, we justify our support of this racist politician. We may deny that this politician is racist even if overwhelming evidence supports the contrary.
This Pack Behavior is ruining America. It’s making us divided against each other. Social media has accelerated Pack Behavior in ways we cannot even imagine because in part in a very short period oftime close to 2.5 billion people worldwide are on social media.
Pack behavior also creates a social outrage machine on Twitter where people will gang up on someone who is perceived as being bad. People get like sharks tasting blood.Take the case of Justine Sacco, for example.
Solitary Wolf
In contrast to being a Pack Wolf, a Solitary Wolf is an independent critical thinker who isn’t beholden to groupthink or being beholden to conforming to the pack.
Pack Behavior on Facebook and Twitter
Where you stand in the social hierarchy in Facebook and Twitter worlds becomes important because the social media environment manipulates you based on rewards and punishments. Rewards are likes and followers, which produce dopamine. We get addicted to dopamine and begin to behave in ways that will enhance our social esteem on these platforms, what Lanier calls “BUMMERland.”
We will also share outrage of the Pack.
We can become an inner troll as a result.
Lanier’s conclusion: Delete your social media.
Three. How does fakery grow exponentially on social media?
Because behavior modification steers people to be fake versions of themselves, curating some grandiose self, everything else that generates from social media is likewise fake (54).
Thesis #3 (Disagreeing with Lanier)
As someone with an addictive personality, I can say that I agree with Jaron Lanier that living in the social media ecosystem brings out our Inner Demon; however, my personal experience as shown that I can calibrate (moderate, adjust, control) my social media behavior in a way that I can avoid most of the self-destructive behaviors he describes, and I find benefit from social media in that I can communicate helpful information for others, share collective anxieties about our cultural and political discontent, the nature of social media for conciseness (brevity) has forced me to be a more efficient writer, saying more with less, and social media lets me “check in” with friends whom I otherwise have no time to visit in the physical world.
Three Sample Thesis Statements That Address the Argument That We Must Delete Our Social Media Accounts
Overview of the Essay Topic
Essay Assignment
For a 1,000-word essay, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now) claim that social media compromises personal excellence, degrades one’s core humanity, and accelerates the disintegration of democracy.
How does social media in the smartphone age hijack our freedom and autonomy and work against our best interests?
Sample Thesis #1
Jaron Lanier makes the persuasive case that social media must be deleted because it is a portable crack machine that enslaves us to addiction, compromises our individuality by turning us into tribalistic conformists, makes us “race to the bottom” for attention, and encourages us to surrender our private data to Big Business.
Supports
The following should be considered for your body paragraphs (mapping components of a thesis):
One. Social media is now a portable crack machine that puts us inside a dopamine feedback loop resulting in a gradual behavior modification and addiction that can entrap even the smartest, most disciplined individuals because the addictive nature of social media is not a bug; it's a feature. Social media exists so that we give up our autonomy.
Two. When we are addicted to anything, including social media's intermittent rewards, we become a nastier, meaner, dumber version of ourselves.
Three. Because we are tribalists, we are vulnerable to social anxiety and social status as it pertains to our social media interactions. Long-term social media immersion results in anxiety and eventually into acute depression.
Four. Not only do we become addicted; our addiction makes us willing participants in our own submission to data mining so that we are the product of the social media companies who sell our most private date to other business entities without our knowledge and consent.
Five. Social media by its very nature tends toward fakery, manipulation, propaganda, and "fake news" because in grabbing attention from the reptilian part of our brains, social media is in a "race to the bottom" to get outrage. This sense of outrage is essential for maximizing clickbait and revenue for the social media companies.
Six. As we adapt to the "race to the bottom," we become more polarized as a society and this polarization degrades democracy while strengthening fascism and totalitarianism.
Facebook and Google. The more a company uses BUMMER the more it attracts trolls like Russian operatives trying to destroy democracies around the world.
Sample Thesis #2
Jaron Lanier makes a compelling case that we must delete our social media accounts because immersing ourselves in the social media ecosystem brings out our Inner Demon through selfish addiction, wolf pack behavior (joining Outrage Machine and Cancel Culture), and attention-getting fakery, which becomes “a race to the bottom.”
Supports
One. How does Lanier compare the A*** Personality Factor to drug addiction?
Social media leads to addiction, which leads to radical personality change. To become an addict is for a normal person to lose her best self to her monster self.
The addict is in a constant state of neediness and deprivation, looking for the next hit. Smartphone nation is a nation of addicts.
Addiction is about selfishness.
The addict “is always deprived, rushing for affirmation.” He is nervous, “compulsively pecking at his situation.” He is selfish, self-absorbed, and too “wrapped-up” in his addictive cycle to have empathy for others (39).
Addicts succumb to a “personal mythology of grandiosity.” This grandeur speaks to their colossal insecurity.
Social media addicts are aggressive: They victimize others and they play the victim.
Social media addicts become competitive trolls trying to “win points” in arguments and become more and more belligerent.
Lanier notices when he was a prominent blogger at Huffpost he received a torrent of belligerent emails. He noticed manipulation and a prominent phony AH Factor, the result of personalities conforming to online addiction.
Of all the arguments against social media, this is the one that he is most emotional and “visceral” about.
How Social Media Creates A***
Simple syllogism: A*** get the most attention. Social media creates attention addiction. Therefore, social media creates A***.
Two. What is Solitary/Pack switch?
Lanier says we all have an inner troll. The troll is the pack wolf. We are more happy and more free as the solitary wolf.
But social media makes us pack wolves.
We all have a Solitary/Pack switch for our inner wolf.
Social media flips the Pack switch on. We become obsessed with our ranking in the wolf pack. Where we stand in our social hierarchy is our everything, so much that we lose contact with reality. Loyalty to the pack becomes more important than any adherence to reality, so if our pack denies climate change, we deny climate change to the death.
If our pack supports a racist politician, we justify our support of this racist politician. We may deny that this politician is racist even if overwhelming evidence supports the contrary.
This Pack Behavior is ruining America. It’s making us divided against each other. Social media has accelerated Pack Behavior in ways we cannot even imagine because in part in a very short period oftime close to 2.5 billion people worldwide are on social media.
Pack behavior also creates a social outrage machine on Twitter where people will gang up on someone who is perceived as being bad. People get like sharks tasting blood.Take the case of Justine Sacco, for example.
Solitary Wolf
In contrast to being a Pack Wolf, a Solitary Wolf is an independent critical thinker who isn’t beholden to groupthink or being beholden to conforming to the pack.
Pack Behavior on Facebook and Twitter
Where you stand in the social hierarchy in Facebook and Twitter worlds becomes important because the social media environment manipulates you based on rewards and punishments. Rewards are likes and followers, which produce dopamine. We get addicted to dopamine and begin to behave in ways that will enhance our social esteem on these platforms, what Lanier calls “BUMMERland.”
We will also share outrage of the Pack.
We can become an inner troll as a result.
Lanier’s conclusion: Delete your social media.
Three. How does fakery grow exponentially on social media?
Because behavior modification steers people to be fake versions of themselves, curating some grandiose self, everything else that generates from social media is likewise fake (54).
Thesis #3 (Disagreeing with Lanier)
As someone with an addictive personality, I can say that I agree with Jaron Lanier that living in the social media ecosystem brings out our Inner Demon; however, my personal experience as shown that I can calibrate (moderate, adjust, control) my social media behavior in a way that I can avoid most of the self-destructive behaviors he describes, and I find benefit from social media in that I can communicate helpful information for others, share collective anxieties about our cultural and political discontent, the nature of social media for conciseness (brevity) has forced me to be a more efficient writer, saying more with less, and social media lets me “check in” with friends whom I otherwise have no time to visit in the physical world.
Essay Assignment 2 due on March 30 with 2 sources for Works Cited:
For a 1,000-word essay, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now) that social media compromises personal excellence, degrades one’s core humanity, and accelerates the disintegration of democracy.
Summarize Lacey's "nosedive" in the "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror.
Or summarize Andrew Sullivan's "nosedive" in his essay "I Used to be Human Being."
Or summarize the "nosedive" of someone you know who got addicted to social media.
Or summarize social media addiction as described in any Tristan Harris or Sherry Turkle video of your choosing.
Or summarize Jaron Lanier's central argument in his book.
Thesis Paragraph 2:
Agree or disagree with the claim that we should delete our social media accounts based on the following evidence:
One. Social media is an addiction trap by design that hijacks our brains.
Two. Social media brings forth our worst version of ourselves.
Three. Social media encourages tribalism and alternative realities.
Four. Social media spreads weaponized misinformation.
Five. In its "race to the bottom" to get clickbait, social media erodes liberal democracies around the world.
Six. Social media encourages us to give up our private data until we have submitted all our privacy, and this surrender will result to a loss of individual rights and freedoms.
Paragraphs 3-6
Choose 4 of the above points to address in your body paragraphs.
Counterargument-Rebuttal Paragraph 7
Find a defense of social media and write a rebuttal of it.
Here are some common counterarguments:
"No one is holding a gun to your head and saying you need to be on social media."
"Social media has connected me to family and friends in ways that otherwise would be impossible."
"You show me extreme cases, but for every pathological social media addict I can show you dozens of well-adjusted mentally healthy people who use social media."
Conclusion Paragraph 8
Write an emotionally powerful restatement of your thesis.
Sample Thesis That Focuses on "Nosedive"
Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" gives us a powerful illustration that living inside the social media ecosystem brings out our demon self so that we should, as Jaron Lanier argues, delete all of our social media accounts.
Support #1:
Living in social media, we aspire to have a high numerical ranking above all else, so we present a phony, cloying, saccharine self to society while repressing our authentic rage against the world's B.S. This facade conceals the broken self that lies underneath.
Support #2:
We abandon friends and friendships; instead, we use other people to catapult our social ranking.
Support #3
In order to enjoy a high social media ranking, we conform to the ways of the tribe even if their positions are immoral. We may for example get on the Outrage Machine and destroy someone who doesn't deserve such severe treatment.
Support #4
Because social ranking determines economic well-being and social privilege in both the fictional world of "Nosedive" and the real world of China, living in the social media ecosystem helps give power to the state to the extreme degrees of fascism and autocracy. This ranking system is a zero-sum game: for every winner there is a loser.
Counterargument and Rebuttal
"I agree with everything you wrote, but it's too late. Social media is a tidal wave; half the world's population is trapped inside the social media ecosystem, so your resistance is futile."
Rebuttal:
"I never said my personal choice to delete my social media accounts would stop the tidal wave. I am simply saving my soul."
March 16 Go over Lanier 39-76. Homework #7 for March 18: Read Lanier 76-145 and in 200-word paragraph, explain the pathological effects of BUMMER.
March 18 Go over Lanier 76-145. Homework #8: Read S-7 Parallelism and define parallelism and take the 2 Practice tests and record your scores before explaining how confident you are no in using parallel structure in future essays.
March 23 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write an introduction, thesis, and two supporting paragraphs. Go over parallelism. Homework #9: Read S-8 Coordination, Subordination and explain the use of coordination and subordination in writing sentences. Take the 2 Practice tests, report your scores, and explain your confidence level.
March 25 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write supporting paragraphs, counterargument-rebuttal paragraph, conclusion, Works Cited page. Go over Homework #9.
March 30 Essay 2 due on turnitin.
McMahon’s Refutation Essay Outline
Paragraph 1: Summarize Tristan Harris’ YouTube video “How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds everyday,” and address the power of the few over the many; the race to the bottom, the outrage machine making clicks, the loss of free agency (free will), the destruction of democracy, the addiction that is baked in the social media landscape, the attention economy, etc.
Paragraph 2: Pivot to Jaron Lanier’s claim that we should delete our social media accounts and then argue that deleting one’s account isn’t the solution and provide reasons for your thesis. These reasons will be your supporting paragraphs.
Some reasons I covered in class:
One. Only mindful people will delete their accounts. This won’t be a game-changer because the majority “Homer Simpsons” won’t heed Harris’ or Lanier’s warnings.
Two. Saying that something is addicting so it should be eliminated from our life is a weak argument. Lots of things are addicting: TV, German chocolate cake, wine, relationships, etc. Moderation, not abstinence, is the more reasonable response.
Three. Disciplined use of social media can be valuable for business, communicating with loved ones who are far away, engaging in meaningful political causes, etc.
Four. Reducing one’s social media by over 90% is probably reasonable.
Five. Time-blocking one’s day is more reasonable than deleting all of one’s social media accounts.
Six. One should have a healthy contempt for social media because the diagnosis of its vileness by Harris and Lanier is accurate, but a healthy contempt doesn’t necessarily translate into deleting one’s accounts. As said earlier, a 90% reduction or more is more reasonable unless you’re hopelessly addicted.
Notice there is no counterargument-rebuttal because the WHOLE essay is a counterargument-rebuttal. This is called a refutation essay.
Conclusion is a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Essay Assignment 2 due on March 30 with 2 sources for Works Cited:
For a 1,000-word essay, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now) that social media compromises personal excellence, degrades one’s core humanity, and accelerates the disintegration of democracy.
Summarize Lacey's "nosedive" in the "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror.
Or summarize Andrew Sullivan's "nosedive" in his essay "I Used to be Human Being."
Or summarize the "nosedive" of someone you know who got addicted to social media.
Or summarize social media addiction as described in any Tristan Harris or Sherry Turkle video of your choosing.
Or summarize Jaron Lanier's central argument in his book.
Thesis Paragraph 2:
Agree or disagree with the claim that we should delete our social media accounts based on the following evidence:
One. Social media is an addiction trap by design that hijacks our brains.
Two. Social media brings forth our worst version of ourselves.
Three. Social media encourages tribalism and alternative realities.
Four. Social media spreads weaponized misinformation.
Five. In its "race to the bottom" to get clickbait, social media erodes liberal democracies around the world.
Six. Social media encourages us to give up our private data until we have submitted all our privacy, and this surrender will result to a loss of individual rights and freedoms.
Paragraphs 3-6
Choose 4 of the above points to address in your body paragraphs.
Counterargument-Rebuttal Paragraph 7
Find a defense of social media and write a rebuttal of it.
Here are some common counterarguments:
"No one is holding a gun to your head and saying you need to be on social media."
"Social media has connected me to family and friends in ways that otherwise would be impossible."
"You show me extreme cases, but for every pathological social media addict I can show you dozens of well-adjusted mentally healthy people who use social media."
Conclusion Paragraph 8
Write an emotionally powerful restatement of your thesis.
Sample Thesis That Focuses on "Nosedive"
Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" gives us a powerful illustration that living inside the social media ecosystem brings out our demon self so that we should, as Jaron Lanier argues, delete all of our social media accounts.
Support #1:
Living in social media, we aspire to have a high numerical ranking above all else, so we present a phony, cloying, saccharine self to society while repressing our authentic rage against the world's B.S. This facade conceals the broken self that lies underneath.
Support #2:
We abandon friends and friendships; instead, we use other people to catapult our social ranking.
Support #3
In order to enjoy a high social media ranking, we conform to the ways of the tribe even if their positions are immoral. We may for example get on the Outrage Machine and destroy someone who doesn't deserve such severe treatment.
Support #4
Because social ranking determines economic well-being and social privilege in both the fictional world of "Nosedive" and the real world of China, living in the social media ecosystem helps give power to the state to the extreme degrees of fascism and autocracy. This ranking system is a zero-sum game: for every winner there is a loser.
Counterargument and Rebuttal
"I agree with everything you wrote, but it's too late. Social media is a tidal wave; half the world's population is trapped inside the social media ecosystem, so your resistance is futile."
Rebuttal:
"I never said my personal choice to delete my social media accounts would stop the tidal wave. I am simply saving my soul."
March 9Essay 1 Due on turnitin. Go over Andrew Sullivan’s “I Used to be a Human Being,” Sherry Turkle, and Tristan Harris. Watch “Nosedive.” Homework #5 for March 11: Read Lanier pages 1-39 and in 200-word paragraph explain how social media destroys free will.
March 11 Go over Lanier 1-39. Homework #6 for March 16: Read pages 39-76 and in a 200-word paragraph explain how social media makes us terrible versions of ourselves.
March 16 Go over Lanier 39-76. Homework #7 for March 18: Read Lanier 76-145 and in 200-word paragraph, explain the pathological effects of BUMMER.
March 18 Go over Lanier 76-145. Homework #8: Read S-7 Parallelism and define parallelism and take the 2 Practice tests and record your scores before explaining how confident you are no in using parallel structure in future essays.
March 23 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write an introduction, thesis, and two supporting paragraphs. Go over parallelism. Homework #9: Read S-8 Coordination, Subordination and explain the use of coordination and subordination in writing sentences. Take the 2 Practice tests, report your scores, and explain your confidence level.
March 25 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write supporting paragraphs, counterargument-rebuttal paragraph, conclusion, Works Cited page. Go over Homework #9.
March 30 Essay 2 due on turnitin.
Number #1 Way to Improve Your Writing:
Signal Phrases
About 80% of your essay should be written in your voice with your words.
Another 20% of your essay will consist of quotations, paraphrase, and summary from credible sources of your choice. We call this "cited material."
When you introduce your cited material, you must use signal phrases.
When you cite material, paraphrases and summaries are with few exceptions superior to direct quotations.
You need minimum 2 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Signal Phrases
Purpose to Make Smooth Transition
We use signal phrases to signal to the reader that we are going to cite research material in the form of direct quotes, paraphrase or summary.
You can also call a signal phrase a lead-in because it leads in the quotation or paraphrase.
Grammarian Diana Hacker writes that signal phrases make smooth transitions from your own writing voice to the quoted material without making the reader feel a "jolt."
For students, signal phrases are an announcement to your professor that you've "elevated your game" to college-level writing by accessing the approved college writing toolbox.
Nothing is going to make your essay more impressive to college professors than the correct use of signal phrases.
Purpose to Provide Context
Signal phrases not only establish authority and credibility. They provide context or explain why you're using the sourced material.
Example:
As a counterpoint to Yuval Noah Harari's contention that Foragers lived superior lives to Farmers, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Same Example with Different Context:
Concurring with my assertion that Harari is misguided in his Noble Savage mythology, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Different Example for Supporting Paragraph
Further supporting my contention that not all calories are equal, we find in science writer Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories that there are statistics that show . . ."
Signal Phrase Comprised of Two Sentences
English instructor Jeff McMahon chronicles in his personal blog Obsession Matters that his opinion toward comedian and podcaster Nate Nadblock changed over a decade. As McMahon observes: "Since 2010, I had found a brilliant curmudgeonly podcaster Nate Nadblock a source of great comfort & entertainment, but recently his navel-gazing toxicity, lack of personal growth, and overall repetitiveness has made him off-putting. Alas, a 10-year podcast friendship has come to an end."
Use the above templates and don't worry: you're not committing plagiarism.
As a counterpoint to X,
As a counterargument to my claim that X,
Giving support to my rebuttal that Writer A makes an erroneous contention, Writer B observes that . . .
Concurring with my assertion that X,
Further supporting my contention that X,
Writer X chronicles in her book. . . . As she observes:
Purpose of Credentials: Establishing Authority and Ethos
We often include credentials with the signal phrase to give more credibility for our sourced material.
The acclaimed best-selling writer, history professor, and futurist Yuval Noah Harari excoriates the Agricultural Revolution as "the greatest crime against humanity."
Lamenting that his students don't enjoy his music playlist in the writing lab, college English instructor Jeff McMahon observes in his blog Obsession Matters: "Two-thirds of my students in writing lab don't hear my chill playlist over classroom speakers because they are hermetically sealed in their private earbud universe content to be masters of their own musical domain."
You don't have to put the signal phrase at the beginning. You can put it at the end:
"The Agricultural Revolution is the greatest crime against humanity," claims celebrated author and futurist Yuval Noah Harari.
You can also put the signal phrase in the middle of a sentence:
Racism, sexism, worker exploitation, and pestilence afflicted the human race during the Agricultural Revolution, claims celebrated futurist Yuval Noah Harari, who goes on to make the bold claim that "the Agricultural Revolution was the greatest crime perpetrated against humanity."
"Covid-19 fears make me recall Don Delillo's novel White Noise," writes Jeff McMahon in his blog Obsession Matters, " especially the Airborne Toxic Event chapter in which pestilence affords us a rehearsal for our own mortality."
Varying placement and types of signal phrases helps you avoid monotony, makes you a more impressive writer, and gives you more ethos.
We are fools if we think we were put on Planet Earth to be happy. That is the fantasy of a four-year-old child. Ironically, this infantile pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. In the words of John Mellencamp: “I don’t think we’re put on this earth to live happy lives. I think we’re put here to challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually.”
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. As we read in Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits' essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Variation of the above:
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits in his essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Toolbox of Explaining Transitions
After you present the signal phrase and quoted, summarized, or paraphrased material, what do you write?
You explain what you just cited.
To do so, you need a toolbox of transitions:
Writer X is essentially saying that
In other words, X is arguing that
By using these statistics, X is making the point that
X is trying to make the point that
X makes the cogent observation that
X is essentially rebutting the philosophical movement that embraces the position that
One. Vary your transitions so you're not only using "say" and "write."
Two. Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material.
Three. Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.
Four. Provide credentials in your signal phrase.
Five. Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided by Purdue Owl.
Overview of the Essay Topic
How does social media in the smartphone age hijack our freedom and autonomy and work against our best interests?
The following should be considered for your body paragraphs (mapping components of a thesis):
One. Social media is now a portable crack machine that puts us inside a dopamine feedback loop resulting in a gradual behavior modification and addiction that can entrap even the smartest, most disciplined individuals because the addictive nature of social media is not a bug; it's a feature. Social media exists so that we give up our autonomy.
Addiction is not a bug; it's the feature.
Two. When we are addicted to anything, including social media's intermittent rewards, we become a nastier, meaner, dumber version of ourselves.
Three. Because we are tribalists, inclined to find belonging in groups, we are vulnerable to social anxiety and social status as it pertains to our social media interactions. Long-term social media immersion results in anxiety and eventually into acute depression.
Four. Not only do we become addicted; our addiction makes us willing participants in our own submission to data mining so that we are the product of the social media companies who sell our most private date to other business entities without our knowledge and consent.
Five. Social media by its very nature tends toward fakery, manipulation, propaganda, and "fake news" because in grabbing attention from the reptilian part of our brains, social media is in a "race to the bottom" to get outrage. This sense of outrage is essential for maximizing clickbait and revenue for the social media companies.
Six. As we adapt to the "race to the bottom," we become more polarized as a society and this polarization degrades democracy while strengthening fascism and totalitarianism.
Facebook and Google. The more a company uses BUMMER the more it attracts trolls like Russian operatives trying to destroy democracies around the world.
People often get weird and nasty online. This bizarre phenomenon surprised everyone in the earliest days of networking, and it has had a profound effect on our world. Nastiness also turned out to be like crude oil for the social media companies and other behaviour manipulation empires that quickly came to dominate the internet, because it fuelled negative behavioural feedback.
Why does the nastiness happen? In brief: ordinary people are brought together in a setting in which the main – or often the only – reward that’s available is attention.
With nothing else to seek but attention, people tend to become assholes, because the biggest ones get the most attention. This inherent bias toward assholedom flavours the action of all the other parts of the Bummer machine.
Spying is accomplished mostly through connected personal devices – especially, for now, smartphones – that people keep practically glued to their bodies. Data is gathered about each person’s communications, interests, movements, contact with others, emotional reactions to circumstances, facial expressions, purchases, vital signs: an ever-growing, boundless variety of data.
Algorithms correlate data from each person and between people. The correlations are effectively theories about the nature of each person, and those theories are constantly measured and rated for how predictive they are. Like all well-managed theories, they improve through adaptive feedback.
C is for Cramming content down your throat
Algorithms choose what each person experiences through their devices. This component might be called a feed, a recommendation engine, or personalisation. It means each person sees different things. The immediate motivation is to deliver stimuli for individualised behaviour modification.
Not all personalisation is part of Bummer. When Netflix recommends a movie or eBay recommends something to buy, it isn’t Bummer. It only becomes Bummer in connection with other components. Neither Netflix nor eBay is being paid by third parties to influence your behaviour apart from the immediate business you do with each site.
D is for Directing behaviours in the sneakiest way possible
The above elements are connected to create a measurement and feedback machine that deliberately modifies behaviour. The process runs thus: customised feeds become optimised to “engage” each user, often with emotionally potent cues, leading to addiction. People don’t realise how they are being manipulated. The default purpose of manipulation is to get people more and more glued in, and to get them to spend more and more time in the system. But other purposes for manipulation are also tested.
For instance, if you’re reading on a device, your reading behaviours will be correlated with those of multitudes of other people. If someone who has a reading pattern similar to yours bought something after it was pitched in a particular way, then the odds become higher that you will get the same pitch. You might be targeted before an election with weird posts that have been proven to bring out the inner cynic in people who are similar to you, in order to reduce the chances that you’ll vote.
Bummer platforms have proudly reported on experimenting with making people sad, changing voter turnout, and reinforcing brand loyalty. Indeed, these are some of the best-known examples of research that were revealed in the formative days of Bummer. The digital network approach to behaviour modification flattens all these examples, all these different slices of life, into one slice. From the point of view of the algorithm, emotions, happiness, and brand loyalty are just different, but similar, signals to optimise.
E is for Earning money from letting the worst people secretly screw with everyone else
The mass behaviour modification machine is rented out to make money. The manipulations are not perfect, but they are powerful enough that it becomes suicidal for brands, politicians, and other competitive entities to forgo payments to Bummer enterprises. Universal cognitive blackmail ensues, resulting in a rising global spend on Bummer.
If someone isn’t paying a platform in cash, then they must turn themselves into data-fuel for that platform in order to not be overwhelmed by it. When Facebook emphasised “news” in its feed, the entire world of journalism had to reformulate itself to Bummer standards. To avoid being left out, journalists had to create stories that emphasised clickbait and were detachable from context. They were forced to become Bummer in order to not be annihilated by it.
F is for Fake mobs and faker society
This component is almost always present, even though it typically wasn’t part of the initial design of a Bummer machine. Fake people are present in unknown but vast numbers and establish the ambience. Bots, AIs, agents, fake reviewers, fake friends, fake followers, fake posters, automated catfishers: a menagerie of wraiths.
Invisible social vandalism ensues. Social pressure, which is so influential in human psychology and behaviour, is synthesised.
The more specifically we can draw a line around a problem, the more solvable that problem becomes. Our problem is not the internet, smartphones, smart speakers, or the art of algorithms; the problem is the Bummer machine. And the core of the machine is not a technology, exactly, but a style of business plan that spews out perverse incentives and corrupts people.
It’s not even a widely used business plan. Outside of China, the only tech giants that fully depend on this system are Facebook and Google. The other three of the big five tech companies indulge occasionally, because it is normalised these days, but they don’t depend on it. A few smaller Bummer companies are also influential, like Twitter, though they often struggle.
Which companies are Bummer? A good way to tell is that first-rank Bummer companies are the ones that attract efforts or spending from bad actors, such as Russian state intelligence warfare units. This test reveals that there are pseudo-services that contain only subsets of the components, like Reddit and 4chan, but still play significant roles in the Bummer ecosystem.
The problem with Bummer is not that it includes any particular technology, but that it’s someone else’s power trip. You might choose to be treated by a cognitive behavioural therapist, and benefit from it. Hopefully that therapist will have sworn an oath to uphold professional standards and will earn your trust. If, however, your therapist is beholden to a giant, remote corporation and is being paid to get you to make certain decisions that aren’t necessarily in your own interests, then that would be a Bummer.
The problem isn’t any particular technology, but the use of technology to manipulate people, to concentrate power in a way that is so nuts and creepy that it becomes a threat to the survival of civilisation.
If you want to help make the world sane, you don’t need to give up your smartphone, using computer cloud services, or visiting websites. Bummer is the stuff to avoid. Delete your accounts!
Loss of Free Will: How Technology Owns Us
Cats integrate with society but essentially remain independent and free. Humans on the other hand will find that their brains get hijacked in the manner Tristan Harris explains.
What’s scary about getting our brains hijacked is that we don’t know they’re getting hijacked. The process is so gradual it feels natural. We become enslaved to the devil because we deny his existence. He ruins us by helping us in our denial. Such is the devil that lurks behind social media. We don’t know our lives we’re ruined with addiction until we’re deep in the muck of it.
Addiction sneaks up on you and catches you unawares.
We’re more like dogs and Facebook or some other social media site has become our Master.
Portability of the Machine destroys our free will.
Lanier observes that the smartphone is a “cage we carry around with us everywhere we go.” Many of us bring our smartphones to bed. Many of my students are so tethered to their smartphones they have a pathological need to attend to it during class. They think this is normal, but this is not normal. This is addiction.
Addiction and Data Mining
We’re being tracked, receiving engineered feedback, and being mined for our data.
We are being molded into specimens for advertising manipulation.
We are being siloed into our political tribe’s bubble.
The Machine causes behavior modification.
We are living in a world beyond advertising.
We are now living in a bubble of “continuous behavior modification.” I refer you to Adam Alter’s book Irresistible.
Lanier writes that we are test subjects in an experiment, and we are not even aware of this.
We should be alarmed, but most of us are not. We are asleep at the wheel, so to speak.
Social media empires are “behavior modification empires,” so writes Lanier.
We become trapped in a short-term dopamine feedback loop.
We get hit with dopamine when we receive likes, followers, and positive feedback. This dopamine becomes a short-term substitute for real self-esteem, real self-confidence, and a real sense of an adult self, but of course this dopamine, like any drug, fails and our tattered self remains the tattered rag that it is.
Jason Lanier is arguing that by becoming addicted to these “short-term dopamine feedback loops” on social media we have lost our free will.
Social media addiction is connected to the growing divisiveness and polarization of society.
Lanier argues that the underlying force of both social media addiction and polarization is behavior modification that leads to helpless addiction. This helpless addiction makes us “crazy.” We’re crazy for more and more dopamine fueled by outrage and short-term self-esteem as we lose sight of real cognitive skills to be full realized adults.
“The addict gradually loses touch with the real world and real people. When many people are addicted to manipulative schemes, the world gets dark and crazy” (10).
The Tech Lords who make us addicted to social media know it’s bad for us.
These very same Tech Lords who design social media don’t allow their children to use social media or gadgets. They send their children to expensive Waldorf schools where technology isn’t allowed.
“Don’t get high on your own supply.”
These Tech Lords know they’re dealing with dangerous addiction because they hire consultants who work with gambling sites to maximize addiction (14).
Social pressure becomes an unhealthy force in the world of social media.
“People are keenly sensitive to social status, judgment, and competition. Unlike most animals, people are not only born absolutely helpless, but also remain so for years. We only survive by getting along with family members and others. Social concerns are not optional features of the human brain. They are primal.”
When we receive negative feedback on social media: being ignored, being scorned, being insulted, or being rejected, we experience hurt. We experience physical and emotional pain.
This hurt is a powerful force in controlling our behavior. We feel compelled to curate an existence to others that they would approve of. Social media pours gasoline on the fire of our desire for others’ validation and approval.
Social Anxiety
The resulting social anxiety from social media is probably enough reason to delete our social media accounts.
When we feel rejected, our social anxiety turns into depression, dejection, and despondency.
For those of us who are already vulnerable to this type of social anxiety and depression, social media is a nightmare scenario.
Rewards and punishments as the primary tools for controlling our behavior is called behaviorism.
Counterarguments that need to be addressed:
One. Social media is free so people of all economic classes can participate in it.
Two. Everyone can participate in the marketplace of ideas. You don't have to be a professional journalist to have a blog or a vlog. Therefore, social media helps spread democracy.
Three. Social media gives us access to information that we've never had before.
Four. Social media helps us connect to people all over the world in ways that were once impossible.
Essay Assignment 2 due on March 30 with 2 sources for Works Cited:
For a 1,000-word essay, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now) that social media compromises personal excellence, degrades one’s core humanity, and accelerates the disintegration of democracy.
Summarize Lacey's "nosedive" in the "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror.
Or summarize Andrew Sullivan's "nosedive" in his essay "I Used to be Human Being."
Or summarize the "nosedive" of someone you know who got addicted to social media.
Or summarize social media addiction as described in any Tristan Harris or Sherry Turkle video of your choosing.
Or summarize Jaron Lanier's central argument in his book.
Thesis Paragraph 2:
Agree or disagree with the claim that we should delete our social media accounts based on the following evidence:
One. Social media is an addiction trap by design that hijacks our brains.
Two. Social media brings forth our worst version of ourselves.
Three. Social media encourages tribalism and alternative realities.
Four. Social media spreads weaponized misinformation.
Five. In its "race to the bottom" to get clickbait, social media erodes liberal democracies around the world.
Six. Social media encourages us to give up our private data until we have submitted all our privacy, and this surrender will result to a loss of individual rights and freedoms.
Paragraphs 3-6
Choose 4 of the above points to address in your body paragraphs.
Counterargument-Rebuttal Paragraph 7
Find a defense of social media and write a rebuttal of it.
Here are some common counterarguments:
"No one is holding a gun to your head and saying you need to be on social media."
"Social media has connected me to family and friends in ways that otherwise would be impossible."
"You show me extreme cases, but for every pathological social media addict I can show you dozens of well-adjusted mentally healthy people who use social media."
Conclusion Paragraph 8
Write an emotionally powerful restatement of your thesis.
Sample Thesis That Focuses on "Nosedive"
Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" gives us a powerful illustration that living inside the social media ecosystem brings out our demon self so that we should, as Jaron Lanier argues, delete all of our social media accounts.
Support #1:
Living in social media, we aspire to have a high numerical ranking above all else, so we present a phony, cloying, saccharine self to society while repressing our authentic rage against the world's B.S. This facade conceals the broken self that lies underneath.
Support #2:
We abandon friends and friendships; instead, we use other people to catapult our social ranking.
Support #3
In order to enjoy a high social media ranking, we conform to the ways of the tribe even if their positions are immoral. We may for example get on the Outrage Machine and destroy someone who doesn't deserve such severe treatment.
Support #4
Because social ranking determines economic well-being and social privilege in both the fictional world of "Nosedive" and the real world of China, living in the social media ecosystem helps give power to the state to the extreme degrees of fascism and autocracy. This ranking system is a zero-sum game: for every winner there is a loser.
Counterargument and Rebuttal
"I agree with everything you wrote, but it's too late. Social media is a tidal wave; half the world's population is trapped inside the social media ecosystem, so your resistance is futile."
Rebuttal:
"I never said my personal choice to delete my social media accounts would stop the tidal wave. I am simply saving my soul."
March 9Essay 1 Due on turnitin. Go over Andrew Sullivan’s “I Used to be a Human Being,” Sherry Turkle, and Tristan Harris. Watch “Nosedive.” Homework #5 for March 11: Read Lanier pages 1-39 and in 200-word paragraph explain how social media destroys free will.
March 11 Go over Lanier 1-39. Homework #6 for March 16: Read pages 39-76 and in a 200-word paragraph explain how social media makes us terrible versions of ourselves.
March 16 Go over Lanier 39-76. Homework #7 for March 18: Read Lanier 76-145 and in 200-word paragraph, explain the pathological effects of BUMMER.
March 18 Go over Lanier 76-145. Homework #8: Read S-7 Parallelism and define parallelism and take the 2 Practice tests and record your scores before explaining how confident you are no in using parallel structure in future essays.
March 23 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write an introduction, thesis, and two supporting paragraphs. Go over parallelism. Homework #9: Read S-8 Coordination, Subordination and explain the use of coordination and subordination in writing sentences. Take the 2 Practice tests, report your scores, and explain your confidence level.
March 25 Chromebook In-Class Writing Objective: Write supporting paragraphs, counterargument-rebuttal paragraph, conclusion, Works Cited page. Go over Homework #9.
March 30 Essay 2 due on turnitin.
Overview of the Essay Topic
How does social media in the smartphone age hijack our freedom and autonomy and work against our best interests?
The following should be considered for your body paragraphs (mapping components of a thesis):
One. Social media is now a portable crack machine that puts us inside a dopamine feedback loop resulting in a gradual behavior modification and addiction that can entrap even the smartest, most disciplined individuals because the addictive nature of social media is not a bug; it's a feature. Social media exists so that we give up our autonomy.
Addiction is not a bug; it's the feature.
Two. When we are addicted to anything, including social media's intermittent rewards, we become a nastier, meaner, dumber version of ourselves.
Three. Because we are tribalists, inclined to find belonging in groups, we are vulnerable to social anxiety and social status as it pertains to our social media interactions. Long-term social media immersion results in anxiety and eventually into acute depression.
Four. Not only do we become addicted; our addiction makes us willing participants in our own submission to data mining so that we are the product of the social media companies who sell our most private date to other business entities without our knowledge and consent.
Five. Social media by its very nature tends toward fakery, manipulation, propaganda, and "fake news" because in grabbing attention from the reptilian part of our brains, social media is in a "race to the bottom" to get outrage. This sense of outrage is essential for maximizing clickbait and revenue for the social media companies.
Six. As we adapt to the "race to the bottom," we become more polarized as a society and this polarization degrades democracy while strengthening fascism and totalitarianism.
Facebook and Google. The more a company uses BUMMER the more it attracts trolls like Russian operatives trying to destroy democracies around the world.
People often get weird and nasty online. This bizarre phenomenon surprised everyone in the earliest days of networking, and it has had a profound effect on our world. Nastiness also turned out to be like crude oil for the social media companies and other behaviour manipulation empires that quickly came to dominate the internet, because it fuelled negative behavioural feedback.
Why does the nastiness happen? In brief: ordinary people are brought together in a setting in which the main – or often the only – reward that’s available is attention.
With nothing else to seek but attention, people tend to become assholes, because the biggest ones get the most attention. This inherent bias toward assholedom flavours the action of all the other parts of the Bummer machine.
Spying is accomplished mostly through connected personal devices – especially, for now, smartphones – that people keep practically glued to their bodies. Data is gathered about each person’s communications, interests, movements, contact with others, emotional reactions to circumstances, facial expressions, purchases, vital signs: an ever-growing, boundless variety of data.
Algorithms correlate data from each person and between people. The correlations are effectively theories about the nature of each person, and those theories are constantly measured and rated for how predictive they are. Like all well-managed theories, they improve through adaptive feedback.
C is for Cramming content down your throat
Algorithms choose what each person experiences through their devices. This component might be called a feed, a recommendation engine, or personalisation. It means each person sees different things. The immediate motivation is to deliver stimuli for individualised behaviour modification.
Not all personalisation is part of Bummer. When Netflix recommends a movie or eBay recommends something to buy, it isn’t Bummer. It only becomes Bummer in connection with other components. Neither Netflix nor eBay is being paid by third parties to influence your behaviour apart from the immediate business you do with each site.
D is for Directing behaviours in the sneakiest way possible
The above elements are connected to create a measurement and feedback machine that deliberately modifies behaviour. The process runs thus: customised feeds become optimised to “engage” each user, often with emotionally potent cues, leading to addiction. People don’t realise how they are being manipulated. The default purpose of manipulation is to get people more and more glued in, and to get them to spend more and more time in the system. But other purposes for manipulation are also tested.
For instance, if you’re reading on a device, your reading behaviours will be correlated with those of multitudes of other people. If someone who has a reading pattern similar to yours bought something after it was pitched in a particular way, then the odds become higher that you will get the same pitch. You might be targeted before an election with weird posts that have been proven to bring out the inner cynic in people who are similar to you, in order to reduce the chances that you’ll vote.
Bummer platforms have proudly reported on experimenting with making people sad, changing voter turnout, and reinforcing brand loyalty. Indeed, these are some of the best-known examples of research that were revealed in the formative days of Bummer. The digital network approach to behaviour modification flattens all these examples, all these different slices of life, into one slice. From the point of view of the algorithm, emotions, happiness, and brand loyalty are just different, but similar, signals to optimise.
E is for Earning money from letting the worst people secretly screw with everyone else
The mass behaviour modification machine is rented out to make money. The manipulations are not perfect, but they are powerful enough that it becomes suicidal for brands, politicians, and other competitive entities to forgo payments to Bummer enterprises. Universal cognitive blackmail ensues, resulting in a rising global spend on Bummer.
If someone isn’t paying a platform in cash, then they must turn themselves into data-fuel for that platform in order to not be overwhelmed by it. When Facebook emphasised “news” in its feed, the entire world of journalism had to reformulate itself to Bummer standards. To avoid being left out, journalists had to create stories that emphasised clickbait and were detachable from context. They were forced to become Bummer in order to not be annihilated by it.
F is for Fake mobs and faker society
This component is almost always present, even though it typically wasn’t part of the initial design of a Bummer machine. Fake people are present in unknown but vast numbers and establish the ambience. Bots, AIs, agents, fake reviewers, fake friends, fake followers, fake posters, automated catfishers: a menagerie of wraiths.
Invisible social vandalism ensues. Social pressure, which is so influential in human psychology and behaviour, is synthesised.
The more specifically we can draw a line around a problem, the more solvable that problem becomes. Our problem is not the internet, smartphones, smart speakers, or the art of algorithms; the problem is the Bummer machine. And the core of the machine is not a technology, exactly, but a style of business plan that spews out perverse incentives and corrupts people.
It’s not even a widely used business plan. Outside of China, the only tech giants that fully depend on this system are Facebook and Google. The other three of the big five tech companies indulge occasionally, because it is normalised these days, but they don’t depend on it. A few smaller Bummer companies are also influential, like Twitter, though they often struggle.
Which companies are Bummer? A good way to tell is that first-rank Bummer companies are the ones that attract efforts or spending from bad actors, such as Russian state intelligence warfare units. This test reveals that there are pseudo-services that contain only subsets of the components, like Reddit and 4chan, but still play significant roles in the Bummer ecosystem.
The problem with Bummer is not that it includes any particular technology, but that it’s someone else’s power trip. You might choose to be treated by a cognitive behavioural therapist, and benefit from it. Hopefully that therapist will have sworn an oath to uphold professional standards and will earn your trust. If, however, your therapist is beholden to a giant, remote corporation and is being paid to get you to make certain decisions that aren’t necessarily in your own interests, then that would be a Bummer.
The problem isn’t any particular technology, but the use of technology to manipulate people, to concentrate power in a way that is so nuts and creepy that it becomes a threat to the survival of civilisation.
If you want to help make the world sane, you don’t need to give up your smartphone, using computer cloud services, or visiting websites. Bummer is the stuff to avoid. Delete your accounts!
Loss of Free Will: How Technology Owns Us
Cats integrate with society but essentially remain independent and free. Humans on the other hand will find that their brains get hijacked in the manner Tristan Harris explains.
What’s scary about getting our brains hijacked is that we don’t know they’re getting hijacked. The process is so gradual it feels natural. We become enslaved to the devil because we deny his existence. He ruins us by helping us in our denial. Such is the devil that lurks behind social media. We don’t know our lives we’re ruined with addiction until we’re deep in the muck of it.
Addiction sneaks up on you and catches you unawares.
We’re more like dogs and Facebook or some other social media site has become our Master.
Portability of the Machine destroys our free will.
Lanier observes that the smartphone is a “cage we carry around with us everywhere we go.” Many of us bring our smartphones to bed. Many of my students are so tethered to their smartphones they have a pathological need to attend to it during class. They think this is normal, but this is not normal. This is addiction.
Addiction and Data Mining
We’re being tracked, receiving engineered feedback, and being mined for our data.
We are being molded into specimens for advertising manipulation.
We are being siloed into our political tribe’s bubble.
The Machine causes behavior modification.
We are living in a world beyond advertising.
We are now living in a bubble of “continuous behavior modification.” I refer you to Adam Alter’s book Irresistible.
Lanier writes that we are test subjects in an experiment, and we are not even aware of this.
We should be alarmed, but most of us are not. We are asleep at the wheel, so to speak.
Social media empires are “behavior modification empires,” so writes Lanier.
We become trapped in a short-term dopamine feedback loop.
We get hit with dopamine when we receive likes, followers, and positive feedback. This dopamine becomes a short-term substitute for real self-esteem, real self-confidence, and a real sense of an adult self, but of course this dopamine, like any drug, fails and our tattered self remains the tattered rag that it is.
Jason Lanier is arguing that by becoming addicted to these “short-term dopamine feedback loops” on social media we have lost our free will.
Social media addiction is connected to the growing divisiveness and polarization of society.
Lanier argues that the underlying force of both social media addiction and polarization is behavior modification that leads to helpless addiction. This helpless addiction makes us “crazy.” We’re crazy for more and more dopamine fueled by outrage and short-term self-esteem as we lose sight of real cognitive skills to be full realized adults.
“The addict gradually loses touch with the real world and real people. When many people are addicted to manipulative schemes, the world gets dark and crazy” (10).
The Tech Lords who make us addicted to social media know it’s bad for us.
These very same Tech Lords who design social media don’t allow their children to use social media or gadgets. They send their children to expensive Waldorf schools where technology isn’t allowed.
“Don’t get high on your own supply.”
These Tech Lords know they’re dealing with dangerous addiction because they hire consultants who work with gambling sites to maximize addiction (14).
Social pressure becomes an unhealthy force in the world of social media.
“People are keenly sensitive to social status, judgment, and competition. Unlike most animals, people are not only born absolutely helpless, but also remain so for years. We only survive by getting along with family members and others. Social concerns are not optional features of the human brain. They are primal.”
When we receive negative feedback on social media: being ignored, being scorned, being insulted, or being rejected, we experience hurt. We experience physical and emotional pain.
This hurt is a powerful force in controlling our behavior. We feel compelled to curate an existence to others that they would approve of. Social media pours gasoline on the fire of our desire for others’ validation and approval.
Social Anxiety
The resulting social anxiety from social media is probably enough reason to delete our social media accounts.
When we feel rejected, our social anxiety turns into depression, dejection, and despondency.
For those of us who are already vulnerable to this type of social anxiety and depression, social media is a nightmare scenario.
Rewards and punishments as the primary tools for controlling our behavior is called behaviorism.
Counterarguments that need to be addressed:
One. Social media is free so people of all economic classes can participate in it.
Two. Everyone can participate in the marketplace of ideas. You don't have to be a professional journalist to have a blog or a vlog. Therefore, social media helps spread democracy.
Three. Social media gives us access to information that we've never had before.
Four. Social media helps us connect to people all over the world in ways that were once impossible.
Social Media & Polarization:
Signal Phrase Guidelines:
About 80% of your essay should be written in your voice with your words.
Another 20% of your essay will consist of quotations, paraphrase, and summary from credible sources of your choice. We call this "cited material."
When you introduce your cited material, you must use signal phrases.
When you cite material, paraphrases and summaries are with few exceptions superior to direct quotations.
You need minimum 2 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Signal Phrases
Purpose to Make Smooth Transition
We use signal phrases to signal to the reader that we are going to cite research material in the form of direct quotes, paraphrase or summary.
You can also call a signal phrase a lead-in because it leads in the quotation or paraphrase.
Grammarian Diana Hacker writes that signal phrases make smooth transitions from your own writing voice to the quoted material without making the reader feel a "jolt."
For students, signal phrases are an announcement to your professor that you've "elevated your game" to college-level writing by accessing the approved college writing toolbox.
Nothing is going to make your essay more impressive to college professors than the correct use of signal phrases.
Purpose to Provide Context
Signal phrases not only establish authority and credibility. They provide context or explain why you're using the sourced material.
Example:
As a counterpoint to Yuval Noah Harari's contention that Foragers lived superior lives to Farmers, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Same Example with Different Context:
Concurring with my assertion that Harari is misguided in his Noble Savage mythology, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Different Example for Supporting Paragraph
Further supporting my contention that not all calories are equal, we find in science writer Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories that there are statistics that show . . ."
Signal Phrase Comprised of Two Sentences
English instructor Jeff McMahon chronicles in his personal blog Obsession Matters that his opinion toward comedian and podcaster Nate Nadblock changed over a decade. As McMahon observes: "Since 2010, I had found a brilliant curmudgeonly podcaster Nate Nadblock a source of great comfort & entertainment, but recently his navel-gazing toxicity, lack of personal growth, and overall repetitiveness has made him off-putting. Alas, a 10-year podcast friendship has come to an end."
Use the above templates and don't worry: you're not committing plagiarism.
As a counterpoint to X,
As a counterargument to my claim that X,
Giving support to my rebuttal that Writer A makes an erroneous contention, Writer B observes that . . .
Concurring with my assertion that X,
Further supporting my contention that X,
Writer X chronicles in her book. . . . As she observes:
Purpose of Credentials: Establishing Authority and Ethos
We often include credentials with the signal phrase to give more credibility for our sourced material.
The acclaimed best-selling writer, history professor, and futurist Yuval Noah Harari excoriates the Agricultural Revolution as "the greatest crime against humanity."
Lamenting that his students don't enjoy his music playlist in the writing lab, college English instructor Jeff McMahon observes in his blog Obsession Matters: "Two-thirds of my students in writing lab don't hear my chill playlist over classroom speakers because they are hermetically sealed in their private earbud universe content to be masters of their own musical domain."
You don't have to put the signal phrase at the beginning. You can put it at the end:
"The Agricultural Revolution is the greatest crime against humanity," claims celebrated author and futurist Yuval Noah Harari.
You can also put the signal phrase in the middle of a sentence:
Racism, sexism, worker exploitation, and pestilence afflicted the human race during the Agricultural Revolution, claims celebrated futurist Yuval Noah Harari, who goes on to make the bold claim that "the Agricultural Revolution was the greatest crime perpetrated against humanity."
"Covid-19 fears make me recall Don Delillo's novel White Noise," writes Jeff McMahon in his blog Obsession Matters, " especially the Airborne Toxic Event chapter in which pestilence affords us a rehearsal for our own mortality."
We are fools if we think we were put on Planet Earth to be happy. That is the fantasy of a four-year-old child. Ironically, this infantile pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. In the words of John Mellencamp: “I don’t think we’re put on this earth to live happy lives. I think we’re put here to challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually.”
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. As we read in Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits' essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Variation of the above:
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits in his essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Toolbox of Explaining Transitions
After you present the signal phrase and quoted, summarized, or paraphrased material, what do you write?
You explain what you just cited.
To do so, you need a toolbox of transitions:
Writer X is essentially saying that
In other words, X is arguing that
By using these statistics, X is making the point that
X is trying to make the point that
X makes the cogent observation that
X is essentially rebutting the philosophical movement that embraces the position that
Read Lanier pages 1-39 and in 3 paragraphs explain how social media destroys free will.
Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism
One. How do so many of us become exhausted and broken by our internet habits?
The internet becomes our boss by making constant demands on our attention. We work so hard to please all the internet forces beckoning us 24/7.
We don’t even know we’re a slave. It happens gradually.
We lose uninterrupted time to focus on creating our better selves. We lose focus.
Internet companies’ success is based on making us addicted. That is their job.
The internet fosters anger and outrage because attention gets traffic, so the internet makes us an angrier, more outraged, more obnoxious version of ourselves, according to techno-philosopher Jaron Lanier.
Over time, Newport observes we lose our autonomy. We become addicts and slaves to the Internet Attention Merchants.
Two. What is the challenge of digital minimalism?
We can’t go back in time. Technology is here to stay. We must learn to reap the benefits while minimizing its liabilities.
Another challenge is to see the futility of “taking a break” or taking a “digital Sabbath” or a “digital cleanse.” Like junk food, Internet use can’t be purged from time to time. Rather, we need to change our overall habits.
Newport writes: What you need is a “full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.”
Such a philosophy seeks to find the sweet spot between the Neo-Luddites, who reject all technology as evil, and the Quantified Self Enthusiasts, who want to embrace technology in every micro task of their existence.
Three. What is the value of focus?
Focus excludes chaos and distraction and makes us concentrate on what makes us achieve excellence and become happy. Internet and social media are about distraction. But we need focus.
Newport quotes Marcus Aurelius: “You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?”
The more we can be digital minimalists, Newport argues, the more we can focus on what makes life satisfying and reverent.
To achieve focus, we must engage in “aggressive action” to combat the pitfalls of social media: mental and spiritual disintegration. Our “hyper-connected world” or “humming matrix of chatter and distraction” is leaving us hyper-disconnected.
Technology became a Frankenstein monster that overtook us and killed our focus. When Steve Jobs first conceived the iPhone, he saw it as an iPod that would keep a phone number directory to make phone calls and play music, not a “general purpose computer” that we carry in our pockets and take to bed with us.
What’s crazy is that the radical influence of Facebook and smartphones on our lives was “unplanned and unexpected.” We have not had time to process this sucker punch to the face.
Four. What are the unforeseen effects of smartphones and social media?
Newport concedes that you can find tech people who use their smartphones and social media to increase their productivity and self-promotion, but this is just a “thin slice” of what is happening.
On a much broader scale, the average social media user has been rapidly losing self-control.
“It’s not about usefulness, it’s about autonomy.”
This loss of autonomy was unplanned, but once the tech lords realized they could control the masses and make money from this, they capitalized on it.
The “nerd gods” are “selling addictive product to children,” to quote Bill Maher.
As Tristan Harris says on Anderson Cooper and his many videos, the smartphone is a slot machine.
Silicon Valley is not programming apps; they’re are programming people.
Five. Is it true that technology is neutral; what makes technology good or bad is how we use it?
The answer is no. Technology is not neutral. It is designed to be addicting, polarizing, and mentally disintegrating. Bill Maher: “Big Tobacco wants your lungs. The App Store wants your soul.”
Six. What specifically is the crack cocaine that gets us hooked on social media?
Here it is: “Intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.”
By intermittent, we are saying the positive reinforcement is unpredictable and erratic in its dishing out rewards; this becomes more addicting than predictable rewards.
Regarding social approval: Since Paleolithic times, we have been hardwired to gain social approval from the tribe in order to increase our survival and status in the group. We are hardwired to want approval.
The converse is a true: A lack of feedback causes anxiety and distress. What is wrong with us? We then do jumping jacks on social media and get lost down social media rabbit holes trying to win approval, the very thing the Tech Lords want for their profits.
When you tag or like someone on social media, they feel obliged to reciprocate; this in effect creates a social-validation feedback loop.
The Tech Lords are “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology,” the very thing a hacker does, so says Sean Parker.
What’s the net sum of this? We have lost control of our digital lives.
Newport cites Adam Alter, author if a book I taught two years ago: Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology.
Compulsive social media use “is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business plan.”
Seven. What is Newport’s central argument throughout the book?
Newport is not arguing whether or not social media and Internet devices are useful or not. He is arguing about how we’ve lost our autonomy.
Eight. What is the book’s most powerful metaphor about gaining our self-control and overcoming addiction?
He cites Plato’s Chariot with Two Horses Metaphor.
We are the driver of the chariot. We have two horses pulling the chariot, our good horse and our crappy horse. When we surrender to digital world, we energize and strengthen the crappy horse, which takes control of our chariot, resulting in our loss of control and direction.
The takeaway is to see how every situation we’re in is an opportunity to strengthen our good or bad horse.
Newport’s “concrete plan” is to show how digital minimalism is a way of strengthening our good horse and weakening our bad one.
In a 1,200-word essay, develop an argumentative thesis that compares the dehumanization in Andrew Sullivan's essay "I Used to be a Human Being" to the dehumanization articulated in Jason Lanier's notion of BUMMER, which is explored in his book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Be sure to have 3 sources for your Works Cited. One of the sources will be Lanier's book.
Study Questions
One. Why does Andrew Sullivan give up his smartphone and enter Internet Addiction Rehab?
His life as a curator of web news had taken over his life, had hijacked his brain, and had attacked his immune system. It didn’t happen overnight. It happened gradually. More and more, he became immersed in Internet activity, and his body and mind could not keep up with it.
What’s crazy is that he was driven to tread water even though he was dying.
He was losing his life. He was dying.
A spark of metacognition (self-awareness) kicked him in the pants and told him to go to rehab before it was too late.
His blogging was killing him while making him rich and famous:
“If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out. Years later, the joke was running thin. In the last year of my blogging life, my health began to give out. Four bronchial infections in 12 months had become progressively harder to kick. Vacations, such as they were, had become mere opportunities for sleep. My dreams were filled with the snippets of code I used each day to update the site. My friendships had atrophied as my time away from the web dwindled. My doctor, dispensing one more course of antibiotics, finally laid it on the line: “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?”
But the rewards were many: an audience of up to 100,000 people a day; a new-media business that was actually profitable; a constant stream of things to annoy, enlighten, or infuriate me; a niche in the nerve center of the exploding global conversation; and a way to measure success — in big and beautiful data — that was a constant dopamine bath for the writerly ego. If you had to reinvent yourself as a writer in the internet age, I reassured myself, then I was ahead of the curve. The problem was that I hadn’t been able to reinvent myself as a human being.”
Sullivan described a certain anxiety I’ve read about in other Internet addicts, and I’ve seen it in myself during my worst times:
I tried reading books, but that skill now began to elude me. After a couple of pages, my fingers twitched for a keyboard. I tried meditation, but my mind bucked and bridled as I tried to still it. I got a steady workout routine, and it gave me the only relief I could measure for an hour or so a day. But over time in this pervasive virtual world, the online clamor grew louder and louder. Although I spent hours each day, alone and silent, attached to a laptop, it felt as if I were in a constant cacophonous crowd of words and images, sounds and ideas, emotions and tirades — a wind tunnel of deafening, deadening noise. So much of it was irresistible, as I fully understood. So much of the technology was irreversible, as I also knew. But I’d begun to fear that this new way of living was actually becoming a way of not-living.
Two. How does Sullivan suggest that the new technology is different from technologies of the past?
The new technology is infinite in its data, and it can penetrate our brains, hijack our brains, and manipulate our behavior through algorithms.
As he writes:
“We absorb this “content” (as writing or video or photography is now called) no longer primarily by buying a magazine or paper, by bookmarking our favorite website, or by actively choosing to read or watch. We are instead guided to these info-nuggets by myriad little interruptions on social media, all cascading at us with individually tailored relevance and accuracy. Do not flatter yourself in thinking that you have much control over which temptations you click on. Silicon Valley’s technologists andtheir ever-perfecting algorithms have discovered the form of bait that will have you jumping like a witless minnow. No information technology ever had this depth of knowledge of its consumers — or greater capacity to tweak their synapses to keep them engaged.
And the engagement never ends. Not long ago, surfing the web, however addictive, was a stationary activity. At your desk at work, or at home on your laptop, you disappeared down a rabbit hole of links and resurfaced minutes (or hours) later to reencounter the world. But the smartphone then went and made the rabbit hole portable, inviting us to get lost in it anywhere, at any time, whatever else we might be doing. Information soon penetrated every waking moment of our lives.”
Three. What is so scary for an Internet Addict who enters rehab?
In a word, silence. In silence, our demons that we’ve been tamping down with distractions come out of the woodwork, and we have to face them.
Another fear is boredom, or the boredom of the abyss. We’re conditioned to be repelled by boredom, as if it were a bad thing when boredom can be very productive and helpful.
Only in silence does our deepest psychic and soulful pain emerge, and we are overtaken by it, a terrifying but necessary event. In Sullivan’s words:
“And then, unexpectedly, on the third day, as I was walking through the forest, I became overwhelmed. I’m still not sure what triggered it, but my best guess is that the shady, quiet woodlands, with brooks trickling their way down hillsides and birds flitting through the moist air, summoned memories of my childhood. I was a lonely boy who spent many hours outside in the copses and woodlands of my native Sussex, in England. I had explored this landscape with friends, but also alone — playing imaginary scenarios in my head, creating little nooks where I could hang and sometimes read, learning every little pathway through the woods and marking each flower or weed or fungus that I stumbled on. But I was also escaping a home where my mother had collapsed with bipolar disorder after the birth of my younger brother and had never really recovered. She was in and out of hospitals for much of my youth and adolescence, and her condition made it hard for her to hide her pain and suffering from her sensitive oldest son.
I absorbed a lot of her agony, I came to realize later, hearing her screams of frustration and misery in constant, terrifying fights with my father, and never knowing how to stop it or to help. I remember watching her dissolve in tears in the car picking me up from elementary school at the thought of returning to a home she clearly dreaded, or holding her as she poured her heart out to me, through sobs and whispers, about her dead-end life in a small town where she was utterly dependent on a spouse. She was taken away from me several times in my childhood, starting when I was 4, and even now I can recall the corridors and rooms of the institutions she was treated in when we went to visit.
I knew the scar tissue from this formative trauma was still in my soul. I had spent two decades in therapy, untangling and exploring it, learning how it had made intimacy with others so frightening, how it had made my own spasms of adolescent depression even more acute, how living with that kind of pain from the most powerful source of love in my life had made me the profoundly broken vessel I am. But I had never felt it so vividly since the very years it had first engulfed and defined me. It was as if, having slowly and progressively removed every distraction from my life, I was suddenly faced with what I had been distracting myself from. Resting for a moment against the trunk of a tree, I stopped, and suddenly found myself bent over, convulsed with the newly present pain, sobbing.”
Four. What are some of the dehumanizing effects of always being online?
We suffer the aforementioned nervous energy.
We find that being online has become, without us being aware of it, a full-time job that becomes more important than real relationships.
We don’t share space with loved ones because our attention becomes fragmented. Likewise, our personalities become just as fragmented.
In Sullivan’s words:
“But of course, as I had discovered in my blogging years, the family that is eating together while simultaneously on their phones is not actually together. They are, in Turkle’s formulation, “alone together.” You are where your attention is. If you’re watching a football game with your son while also texting a friend, you’re not fully with your child — and he knows it. Truly being with another person means being experientially with them, picking up countless tiny signals from the eyes and voice and body language and context, and reacting, often unconsciously, to every nuance. These are our deepest social skills, which have been honed through the aeons. They are what make us distinctively human.
By rapidly substituting virtual reality for reality, we are diminishing the scope of this interaction even as we multiply the number of people with whom we interact. We remove or drastically filter all the information we might get by being with another person. We reduce them to some outlines — a Facebook “friend,” an Instagram photo, a text message — in a controlled and sequestered world that exists largely free of the sudden eruptions or encumbrances of actual human interaction. We become each other’s “contacts,” efficient shadows of ourselves.”
Another type of dehumanization: losing satisfaction of doing focused work. As Sullivan writes:
“Yes, online and automated life is more efficient, it makes more economic sense, it ends monotony and “wasted” time in the achievement of practical goals. But it denies us the deep satisfaction and pride of workmanship that comes with accomplishing daily tasks well, a denial perhaps felt most acutely by those for whom such tasks are also a livelihood — and an identity.”
We also suffer the breakdown of community. As Sullivan observes:
So are the bonds we used to form in our everyday interactions — the nods and pleasantries of neighbors, the daily facial recognition in the mall or the street. Here too the allure of virtual interaction has helped decimate the space for actual community. When we enter a coffee shop in which everyone is engrossed in their private online worlds, we respond by creating one of our own. When someone next to you answers the phone and starts talking loudly as if you didn’t exist, you realize that, in her private zone, you don’t. And slowly, the whole concept of a public space — where we meet and engage and learn from our fellow citizens — evaporates. Turkle describes one of the many small consequences in an American city: “Kara, in her 50s, feels that life in her hometown of Portland, Maine, has emptied out: ‘Sometimes I walk down the street, and I’m the only person not plugged in … No one is where they are. They’re talking to someone miles away. I miss them.’ ”
Another form of dehumanization is dopamine addiction. Sullivan writes:
Has our enslavement to dopamine — to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak — made us happier? I suspect it has simply made us less unhappy, or rather less aware of our unhappiness, and that our phones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety.
In addition to dopamine addiction, your brain enters a zombie limbo state, where you don’t feel full emotions:
“He recalled a moment driving his car when a Bruce Springsteen song came on the radio. It triggered a sudden, unexpected surge of sadness. He instinctively went to pick up his phone and text as many friends as possible. Then he changed his mind, left his phone where it was, and pulled over to the side of the road to weep. He allowed himself for once to be alone with his feelings, to be overwhelmed by them, to experience them with no instant distraction, no digital assist. And then he was able to discover, in a manner now remote from most of us, the relief of crawling out of the hole of misery by himself. For if there is no dark night of the soul anymore that isn’t lit with the flicker of the screen, then there is no morning of hopefulness either. As he said of the distracted modern world we now live in: “You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel … kinda satisfied with your products. And then you die. So that’s why I don’t want to get a phone for my kids.”
Yet another form of dehumanization in Sullivan’s view is the elevation of consumerism into a religion, which has replaced legitimate faith. Sullivan writes:
In his survey of how the modern Westlost widespread religious practice, A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor used a term to describe the way we think of our societies. He called it a “social imaginary” — a set of interlocking beliefs and practices that can undermine or subtly marginalize other kinds of belief. We didn’t go from faith to secularism in one fell swoop, he argues. Certain ideas and practices made others not so much false as less vibrant or relevant. And so modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow disproved the unprovable, but because the white noise of secularism has removed the very stillness in which it might endure or be reborn.
Five. Why are we hostile toward silence and embrace the noise and chatter of the internet?
For one, as social creatures we are hardwired to love gossip. Gossip is part of the moral glue that keeps societies together.
For two, noise is confused with the sound of being busy, which makes us feel like we’re adhering to a work ethic. But in fact we’re not. We’re merely scatterbrained.
As Sullivan explains:
“Silence in modernity became, over the centuries, an anachronism, even a symbol of the useless superstitions we had left behind. The smartphone revolution of the past decade can be seen in some ways simply as the final twist of this ratchet, in which those few remaining redoubts of quiet — the tiny cracks of inactivity in our lives — are being methodically filled with more stimulus and noise.
And yet our need for quiet has never fully gone away, because our practical achievements, however spectacular, never quite fulfill us. They are always giving way to new wants and needs, always requiring updating or repairing, always falling short. The mania of our online lives reveals this: We keep swiping and swiping because we are never fully satisfied. The late British philosopher Michael Oakeshott starkly called this truth “the deadliness of doing.” There seems no end to this paradox of practical life, and no way out, just an infinite succession of efforts, all doomed ultimately to fail.
Counterarguments for Your Essay:
Digital Literacy or Digital Minimalism
Is deletion of social media too extreme? Isn't digital literacy a better solution? See the following:
Whether or not you go off social media, you have to achieve a savvy digital literacy that allows you to perform "Deep Work." What is Deep Work?
Study Questions
One. What is Deep Work and why is it important?
Definition
Deep Work is distraction-free concentration on professional activities “that push your cognitive abilities to your limit.”
To give us a clear grasp of the focus required for deep work, Newport quotes Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges:
“Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea.”
Deep Work’s 3 Important Results
Deep Work has 3 important results: It creates new value, improves your skill, and creates unique work that is hard to replicate.
Science Supports Claims About Deep Work
Only through deep work can we maximize our intellectual capacity and see how far we can go with what skills and talents we have.
Neurological and psychological studies support the claim that pushing yourself in non-distracted focus and enduring mental discomfort in pursuit of your goals is the only way to improve your skills.
What Should be Obvious and Commonplace No Longer Is in the Social Media Age
It should be obvious that you need prolonged focus attention to maximize the quality of your work, and it should be commonplace that people follow such a principle.
However, in the age of social media, emails, messaging, and texting, we live in an age of Attention Fragmentation.
Shallow Work
The activities done in a state of multi-tasking and attention fragmentation amount to what Newport calls shallow work.
Shallow work has become the norm, the commonplace. We think it’s natural because everyone else does it.
But shallow work results in mediocrity at best, and more often than not shallow work results in us becoming “bottom feeders” in the competitive economy.
If we want to be on the top of the food chain, we have to engage in Deep Work, which means committing ourselves to losing our distractions.
It’s difficult to commit to deep work because we live in a culture that encourages shallow work. We work in multi-tasking work environments in which were required to instantly respond to email, text messages, not to mention people who are playing games and uploading images on social media sites.
Most people are in a fragmented state and are performing shallow work. What they do is easily replicated.
Shallow work also makes us unfocused, unhappy, depressed, and hollowed-out versions of ourselves.
Recent studies even show that huge declines in teen drug and alcohol use might be explained by drugs and alcohol being substituted with smartphone and social media addiction.
Two. What is the difference between influential people and most people who are employed in the “knowledge work” industry?
Influential people have one thing in common: They make deep work a priority. In contrast, most knowledge workers or white-collar workers do shallow work.
Three. What is shallow work and why is it so dangerous?
Shallow work is non-demanding busy “logistical” work that anyone can do. Shallow work is done in a state of distraction and multi-tasking.
In other words, shallow work is meaningless work, and we can safely conclude that meaningless work, while easy, will bore and depress us.
The vicious cycle of shallow work is the more we’re bored and depressed by our shallow work the more we crave distractions like social media sharing, so that we become trapped in a cycle of shallow work and depression.
When we get jobs that require shallow work, we reduce ourselves to “human routers,” and as such we are very replaceable by new software and new machines. Does anyone want a job that reduces them to a “human router?”
What adds to this tragedy is that as teens we become acclimated to being addicted to our smartphones, social media sharing, and multi-tasking so that at a very young age we are conditioning ourselves for shallow work and depression.
Another tragedy is that shallow work can cripple us so that we may never be able to deep work. As Newport writes: “Spend your time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.”
Four. What practical career matter does Cal Newport want to address in his book?
Newport is observing that as fewer and fewer people are engaging in deep work, deep work is becoming more and more prized so that to be able to perform deep work in this new environment makes one more sought after for the most desirable jobs.
In other words, committing yourself to deep work gives you a huge competitive advantage over shallow workers.
Newport presents this idea in his “Deep Work Hypothesis”:
The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
Newport uses the example of Jason Benn who was a replaceable worker doing spreadsheets. He did shallow work and found himself addicted to distraction like checking his emails all the time. When he got replaced by a computer program, he forced himself to learn computer programming, a task that only deep workers can do.
He had to re-condition himself, unplug himself from his “drug”: smartphone distractions, and go into deep work. Only after becoming a deep worker did he surpass others in his field of computer science.
Your friends who think they’re cool, hip, and sexy being plugged in to their smartphones all day and night are conditioning themselves to be bottom-feeders, depressed members of the Shallow Work Society. Do you want to join their ranks or be a Deep Worker? It’s up to you.
Five. Why is deep work more important than ever?
Newport observes that we entering the Intellectual Machine Age, also called The Great Restructuring, in which robots and high-tech are replacing a significant amount of jobs. This job loss if very scary to the workforce.
However, there are 3 fields that will provide “lucrative” income to the American workforce and all 3 fields require deep work.
Being a superstar and a venture capitalist are 2 fields, but those fields are not realistic for most of us. However, Newport points to a third field that should interest us: Being able to work with Intelligent Machines.
The types of majors that allow us to work well with Intelligent Machines are computer science, math, and statistics.
All 3 of these majors require deep work. You’re not getting anywhere if you’re on your smartphone all day and night.
Six. What is deliberate practice and why is it important to deep work?
To do deep work, one must engage in deliberate practice, which requires two things:
One, is prolonged focus and this strains the mind. However, the longer you do prolonged focus the more you develop the myelin plasma shafts in your brain, which become thicker like bigger broadband. They are fatty tissue that allow brain circuits to fire in your brain. The stronger these brain circuits become the more they can fire effortlessly and effectively.
Later Newport explains that oligodenrocytes wrap layers of myelin around the neurons “cementing the skill.” Only intense focus achieves this.
Shallow work, in contrast, weakens the myelin brain circuits. Transforming yourself from a shallow to deep worker requires a re-hardwiring of your brain circuits.
Two, deliberate practice requires that you receive feedback so that you can correct and improve your approach.
Deliberate practice produces higher quality work. As Newport writes:
High-Quality Work Produced= (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
(The above formulation applies to students’ essays as well)
Seven. What is the relationship between multitasking and “attention residue”?
When we switch back and forth between Task A and Task B (and maybe Task D and C?), we suffer from attention residue in which the previous task is soaking our brain with residue that we’re not focused on the task at hand.
The result is loss of focus intensity, and this leads to mediocrity. We’re drifting into becoming “human routers” and bottom-feeders.
Oversimplification
Is Lanier committing an oversimplification by being one-sided? See the following:
Correct the faulty parallelism by rewriting the sentences below.
One. Parenting toddlers is difficult for many reasons, not the least of which is that toddlers contradict everything you ask them to do; they have giant mood swings and all-night tantrums.
Parenting toddlers is difficult for many reasons, not the least of which is that toddlers contradict everything you ask them to do, they have giant mood swings, and they have all-night tantrums.
Two. You should avoid all-you-can-eat buffets: They encourage gluttony; they feature fatty, over-salted foods and high sugar content.
You should avoid all-you-can-eat buffets: They encourage gluttony, they feature fatty, over-salted foods, and the lard everything with sugar.
Three. I prefer kettlebell training at home than the gym because of the increased privacy, the absence of loud “gym” music, and I’m able to concentrate more.
I prefer kettlebell training at home than the gym because of the increased privacy, the absent gym music, and the improved concentration.
Four. To write a successful research paper you must adhere to the exact MLA format, employ a variety of paragraph transitions, and writing an intellectually rigorous thesis.
To write a successful research paper you must adhere to the exact MLA format, employ a variety of paragraph transitions, and write an intellectually rigorous thesis.
Five. The difficulty of adhering to the MLA format is that the rules are frequently being updated, the sheer abundance of rules you have to follow, and to integrate your research into your essay.
The difficulty of adhering to the MLA format is that the rules are frequently being updated, the rules are hard to follow, and the MLA in-text citations are difficult to master.
Six. You should avoid watching “reality shows” on TV because they encourage a depraved form of voyeurism; they distract you from your own problems and their brain-dumbing effects.
You should avoid watching "reality shows" because they encourage a depraved form of voyeurism, they distract you from your own problems, and they dumb you down.
Seven. I’m still fat even though I’ve tried the low-carb diet, the Paleo diet, the Rock-in-the-Mouth diet, and fasting every other day.
I'm still fat even though I've tried the low-carb diet, the Paleo diet, the Rock-in-the-Mouth diet, and the fasting diet.
Eight. To write a successful thesis, you must have a compelling topic, a sophisticated take on that topic, and developing a thesis that elevates the reader’s consciousness to a higher level.
To write a successful thesis, you must have a compelling topic, a sophisticated take on that topic, and a thesis that elevates the reader's consciousness to a higher level.
Nine. Getting enough sleep, exercising daily, and the importance of a positive attitude are essential for academic success.
Getting enough sleep, exercising daily, and maintaining a positive attitude are essential for academic success.
Ten. My children never react to my calm commands or when I beg them to do things.
My children never react to my calm commands or my lugubrious supplications.
Paragraph 1: Write a cautionary tale of someone who followed the Passion Hypothesis or simply define the Passion Hypothesis.
Paragraph 2: Make a claim or argument in defense or refutation of Newport's thesis that the Passion Hypothesis is an impediment to success.
Thesis Example for Paragraph 2:
"Cal Newport's argument that we should shun the Passion Hypothesis and replace it with a craftsman's mindset is convincing (is not convincing) because ______________, ______________, _________________, and ______________________.
Paragraphs 3-6: Develop body paragraphs that support your claim.
Paragraph 7: Write a counterargument and rebuttal to show reader you've considered opposing views.
Paragraph 8: Write a conclusion that restates your claim or thesis with emotional power.
1,000 words
Sources and Signal Phrases
You must use at least 2 sources and 6 signal phrases for your essay.
Essay Option B:
Suggested Essay Structure:
Paragraph 1: Explain the homework dilemma facing America for your introduction.
Paragraph 2: Develop a thesis that agrees or disagrees with Greenfeld's contention that his daughter is assigned too much homework and this overload points to a broader problem about homework in American society.
Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-Rebuttal Paragraph in which you anticipate how your opponents will oppose your thesis and your rebuttal to their counterargument.
Paragraph 8: Conclusion: Dramatic reiteration of your thesis.
1,000 words
Sources and Signal Phrases
You must use at least 2 sources and 6 signal phrases for your essay.