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. You may also consult Black Mirror episode “Nosedive,” Sherry Turkle’s Ted Talk “Connected, But Alone,” and Tristan Harris’ Ted Talk video “How a Handful of Tech Companies Control Billions of Minds Everyday.” Also consult these works from Tristan Harris: “Our Minds Have Been Hijacked by Our Phones,” and “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds. You can also use Andrew Sullivan’s and “I Used to be a Human Being” and any other credible source.
March 9 Essay 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.
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:
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.
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: Assholes get the most attention. Social media creates attention addiction. Therefore, social media creates assholes.
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 that 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 of time 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: Exit BUMMERland.
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).
BUMMER amplifies everything that is fake because in part fake gets attention; real does not.
How Lies Beat the Truth
Armies of fake people gather to “steal the oxygen in the room” so that real voices can’t be heard (55).
If swarms of trolls repeat lies over and over, how do truth-tellers spend time on real news when they have to waste their time refuting lies, which becomes an exercise in futility.
When trolls accused President Obama of being a Muslim terrorist who didn’t have a birth certificate to prove that he was born in America, the media wasted a lot of time rebuking a lie that was so preposterous that it should not have been even addressed, but because of huge movement propagated this lie, the lie could not be ignored. The lie “stole the oxygen in the room,” so to speak.
Holocaust Deniers on Facebook
Zuckerberg allows Holocaust deniers to have a voice on Facebook as we read in this Guardian article.
Fake News Makes Money for Social Media Sites
Fake accounts spreading sensational fake news get a lot of hits and traffic for Facebook and YouTube, so these platforms profit from lies.
Fake news makes lots of money and is hard to detect, as we see in this Washington Post article.
Writing fake news can make individuals more than $10,000 a month on AdSense according to this Washington Post article.
Social Media Profits from Tribalistic Partisan Hatred of The Other
Fair-minded news is too boring for social media platforms, which appeal to our lowest reptilian self, so social media news by its very nature is tribalistic, partisan, hateful, and reptilian. As a result, America has never been so divided (57).
Fake News Is Dangerous
The mass lie that vaccination shots are dangerous and the cause of autism gains steam on social media platforms so that parents deny their children proper vaccinations. This can result in epidemics of measles and other life-threatening diseases.
People who immerse themselves in BUMMER cannot think critically. They are loyal to their tribe but disconnected from reality.
Four. How does social media remove context?
Social media replaces any context you give to your content with its own context, based on algorithms. “You are no longer a name but a number” (65). He continues: “A number is public verification of reduced freedom, status, and personhood.” In other words, living in social media’s algorithm-based context is a prison.
Five. How is social media destroying empathy and human connection?
Two ways: tribalism by isolating us in our own filter bubbles and the loss of public space to inward smartphone absorption.
Filter bubbles alters our reality and cuts us off the reality of others, as explained in this Ted Talk video of 9 minutes.
Consider we live in our own filter bubbles.
Consider we are cut off from our sense of physical space as we get and more and more plugged in to our smartphones.
Consider we become loyal to our tribe by expressing rage against our foes on the Social Outrage Machine of social media.
Consider all of the above, and you’ll see we’re becoming a people cut off from one other. This should concern us for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is violence.
Six. How does social media strip us of our capacity for happiness?
Social media makes its profits by winning our attention, so much so that these “attention merchants” are motivated to turn us into addicts. Addiction spells the end of happiness. As Jaron Lanier writes: “It will dole out sparse charms in between the doldrums as well, since the autopilot that tugs at your emotions will discover that the contrast between treats and punishment is more effective than either treats or punishment alone. Addiction is associated with anhedonia, the lessened ability to take pleasure from life apart from whatever one is addicted to, and social media addicts appear to be prone to long-term anhedonia” (82).
Anhedonia is the self-imposed prison of isolation and futile pleasure from a life that is beholden to addiction.
Fakery on the Internet
"How Much of the Internet Is Fake?" by Max Read
Addiction & Feedback Loop
One. How long would you stay on Facebook or any other social media site if your posts were ignored?
These social media sites would die except that they give feedback. For example, one of the most popular sites, Reddit, uses up and down arrows to show approval or condemnation of posts.
Feedback is a reward system that stimulates the brain.
Social media works in part because of what we might call the Mutual Sycophant Club: I scratch your back and you scratch my back. We like each other’s posts, no matter how insipid, unremarkable, and mediocre, in order to fuel the feedback loop.
Getting caught up in this loop is a huge time suck, a huge distraction, a huge waste, and a huge diversion from meaningful pursuits. But its draw is peer pressure and the tyranny of Technology: Don’t live in the common currency of technology and be irrelevant, invisible, and essentially dead.
It takes a lot of courage to live off the grid.
Many people cannot do it. They are so dependent on the sense of community, however fake, that they derive from their social media accounts. To delete their accounts would result in a feeling of terrifying, primal aloneness, for which there is no word in English. We have to look to German:
Mutterseelinallein: complete abandonment, the sense that your mother's soul has left you.
People with tattered, undeveloped, needy selves will be too scared to go off the grid because they will become possessed by the terror of mutterseelinallein.
Feedback Loop Can Be Explained by Pigeon Experiments
In 1971, researcher Michael Zeiler did pigeon experiments in which he found they pecked more ravenously when their pellet rewards were inconsistently given because the inconsistency was analogous to gambling’s dopamine effects.
Decades later, Facebook did an experiment with a “like” button, the first of its kind on the Internet, and the “like” button had the effect of crack cocaine. It was a game-changer. Suddenly Facebook grew exponentially, not just in users, but in the amount of time users spent on Facebook.
Getting “likes” was like gambling. Your uploaded photo might win a lucky strike or it might be a dud, but when you got a “full house,” as it were, you received a huge dopamine hit.
Facebook users got addicted. They experienced euphoria when they enjoyed a hailstorm of “likes”; they experienced shame and anguish when their posts were ignored or not liked.
Think about it: Adults with higher degrees of education, with high-ranking jobs, with family responsibilities were sitting at their computers in their robes drinking their green Matcha tea or eating their Hot Pockets while obsessing over their Facebook ranking. They had been reduced to experimental pigeons. They had become needy and pathetic.
But here’s the thing: Users were on Facebook LONGER than before. And that’s the point. Website creators want you on their site, the longer the better. They need to find ways to get you hooked. They don’t like you. They don’t respect you. They look at you as a potential addict, and they’re the pusher.
They actually look at you as a dumb rat or a dumb pigeon. They are rich, and they are laughing at us.
In fact, Mark Zuckerberg is on record for having said that “trusting Facebook users are dumb *****.”
Two. What is the Human Self-Inflicted Distraction Principle?
Studies show that humans can’t sit still. They can’t be alone with their thoughts. They settle into a life of easy because, ironically, settling into the good life, a life full of comfort and non-conflict, drives people crazy.
People will induce their own problems out of nothing, they will create new challenges, they will sink into a hole, just so they can create a solution to a problem that never had to exist in the first place.
Rich movie stars do nose dives into self-destruction, we are told, because the thrill of success can’t be enjoyed unless interrupted by challenge.
In other words, we’re incurably stupid.
We operate on the Self-Inflicted Distraction Principle.
The drug pushers of the Internet know this all too well.
The makers of games know this all too well.
Tetris and World of Warcraft are built for people who need constant challenge and distraction.
People are addicted to setting never-ending goals to avoid being still.
Karoshi
They play games, try to improve their social media status, wear fitness watches, take their work home on laptops to “get ahead of the curve,” and the final summation of this never-ending treadmill is the Japanese term karoshi—“death from overworking.”
Getting on the Internet treadmill becomes a neurosis and a disease. People lose their essential self, and they don’t know it because it feels normal.
Three. What is the Zeigarnik Effect?
Incomplete experiences occupy our minds and stay in our memories more than completed ones.
This is analogous to a cliff hanger for a TV show. If it ends on a cliff hanger, we are more likely to become obsessed and watch subsequent shows.
Cliff hangers can create compulsive binge-watching.
“Post-play” maximizes the cliff hanger principle. Breaking Bad from Netflix becomes a 13-hour nonstop movie punctuated with cliff hangers.
The Assist
The Netflix binge became a phenomenon, and the binge works because in addition to cliff hangers, Netflix has your programming defaulted so that if you do nothing but just sit in front of the screen the next episode will begin automatically. This is called an “assist” in the industry.
Four. What is the “bad is stronger than good” principle?
No matter how good the reviews on Yelp, Amazon, and Rate My Professor, it’s the bad reviews that stick out and have the biggest influence on people.
This principle applies to social media. You may get lots of good feedback on your channel, but it’s the mean ones that punch you in the gut and make you forget the positive feedback.
Always wanting to overcome negative feedback with greater and greater positive feedback feeds social media addiction.
Five. Why are children more vulnerable to Internet addiction than adults?
Children don’t have the natural boundaries that mature people have.
And just as dangerous, if we let children do easy things like using the Internet at the expense of more difficult albeit rewarding things like reading books, we deprive children of an important principle: Hardship inoculation.
The younger we experience tough tasks and learn how to overcome their difficulty the more we will embrace meaningful, challenging tasks later in life. For example, we may be tragically raising a generation of non-book readers.
Six. What is gamification?
Gamification is taking a non-game experience like fitness, nutrition, or social media abstinence, and turning it into a game with points and opportunities to beat personal records and so on.
Alter writes: “Gamification is a powerful business tool and if harnessed appropriately it also drives happier, healthier, and wiser behavior. “
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