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Should You Abandon Social Media?

2021-07-16 · letter vlog · Hank · 3:58 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Internet & YouTube · mode: Personal essay · tags: self promotion

Hank, who worries about social media but likes it and is good at it, rejects the choice between staying on or leaving Twitter: use it the way you wish others did, refuse manufactured outrage, and fix big complicated systems rather than throwing them away, since he still believes in the internet's promise.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Worries about social media (Bo Burnham's Inside, loneliness, shared truth) versus liking it; the hamburger analogy

  • ★★ Hank sometimes worries a little about how central social media has become in his life; watching Bo Burnham's Inside, it doesn't all seem great. — 00:00:00 · social media
  • ★★ Hank says loneliness, isolation and mental health problems seem a little correlated with social media, if not caused by it. (hedged) — 00:00:00 · mental disorder, social media
  • ★★ Hank says the radical decentralization of information sharing and gathering seems to have played a part in the erosion of shared truth and discourse. (hedged) — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Hank likes social media and is good at it, has done it a very long time, finds it fun, and on an average day is grateful for his job creating things on the internet. — 00:00:29 · social media
  • ★★ Hank compares hamburgers, which he hates to hate because he loves them though they are bad for nearly everyone involved, and asks whether the internet is like a cow. — 00:00:29

00:00:51 — The internet is not like a cow; the third choice: use Twitter the way you wish others used it

  • ★★★ Hank doesn't think the internet is like a cow: not having cows anymore would probably be for the best, but the internet vanishing one day would be worse. — 00:00:51

  • ★★★ Rejecting the usual choice of staying on or leaving Twitter, Hank proposes a third: use Twitter the way you wish other people used it, which is hard but possible. — 00:00:51 · Twitter

    “use Twitter the way that you wish other people used it”

  • ★★ Since around January this year (2021) Hank has used Twitter in a way he enjoys: making jokes, talking about things he loves and his life, and joining productive discussion of less heated topics. (hedged) — 00:01:19 · Twitter

  • ★★ Hank says that is hard because either Twitter's culture or its structure seems to want to draw users into the hottest thing of the day. (hedged) — 00:01:19 · Twitter

00:01:45 — Lindsey Graham's Chick-fil-A tweet and the reply Hank deleted

  • ★★ Hank says two days ago Lindsey Graham tweeted he would go to war for Chick-fil-A's values, a tweet so well designed to create screaming that this is clearly its goal; Hank began composing a reply. — 00:01:45 · Twitter
  • ★★★ Hank deleted his tweet because this is exactly what Twitter is worst at: attention to such a controversy only lends power to divisive politicians who chip humanity apart to create engaged anger. — 00:02:14 · Twitter

00:02:44 — Don't throw away complicated systems; ask how to do it differently

  • ★★★ Hank says it is easy to see only the problems of a large complicated system and want to throw it away, but usually you can't; the hard question is what actions make it better and how to do it differently. — 00:02:44
  • ★ Hank puts it as not how to stop eating hamburgers but how to make a hamburger without a cow. — 00:02:44

00:03:13 — Many-to-many communication is new; keep fighting for the internet's promise; paperback plug for his two novels

  • ★★★ Hank says massive-scale many-to-many communication is brand new and did not exist when he was born; we are bad at it because we are new to it, and it causes disruption, division and suffering, but problems aren't fixed by ignoring them. — 00:03:13 · social media
  • ★★★ Hank loves the internet and still believes in its promise, though it is more delayed than he assumed, and thinks we should keep thinking about and fighting for it. — 00:03:13
  • ★★ Hank says his two novels telling one story, the first about the internet now and the second about what it might become, are both available in paperback as of this week (week of 12 July 2021), wherever books are sold. — 00:03:13 · An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description says Hank thinks about Twitter a lot, probably too much. (hedged) — video description · Twitter
  • ★★★ The description says the moments when Hank feels he can't control himself on social media are when he most shouldn't use it; right now he feels relatively in control. — video description · social media
  • ★★ The description says Hank tries not to communicate with anyone when he is not in control, yet people often seem to prefer messages from those who are out of control or make others lose control. — video description

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: social media · Twitter

Also: People: Bo Burnham · Lindsey Graham

Works: A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor · An Absolutely Remarkable Thing · Bo Burnham: Inside

Organizations: Chick-fil-A

Concepts: loneliness · mental disorder · moral outrage · post-truth politics

Events: COVID-19 pandemic

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