How Facebook Warps Our Worlds

THOSE who’ve been raising alarms about Facebook are right: Almost every minute that we spend on our smartphones and tablets and laptops, thumbing through favorite websites and scrolling through personalized feeds, we’re pointed toward foregone conclusions. We’re pressured to conform.

.. “And one of the things we want is to spend more time with people who think like us and less with people who are different,” Haidt added

.. this information is utterly contingent on choices we ourselves make. If we seek out, “like” and comment on angry missives from Bernie Sanders supporters, we’ll be confronted with more angry missives from more Sanders supporters. If we banish such outbursts, those dispatches disappear.

.. The Internet isn’t rigged to give us right or left, conservative or liberal — at least not until we rig it that way. It’s designed to give us more of the same

.. We construct precisely contoured echo chambers of affirmation that turn conviction into zeal, passion into fury, disagreements with the other side into the demonization of it.

.. We question their wisdom and substitute it with the groupthink of micro-communities

.. Haidt noted that it often discourages dissent within a cluster of friends by accelerating shaming. He pointed to the enforced political correctness among students at many colleges

.. “Facebook allows people to react to each other so quickly that they are really afraid to step out of line,” he said.

How Paper Shaped Civilization

The material gave rise to currency, bureaucracy, and modern communication—and caused panic over technological change.

The anonymous person who snagged the @Plato Twitter handle eight years ago took these words to heart and has never tweeted anything. So far, it’s been a brilliant performance.

.. so parchment was next in line, made by scraping and processing animal skins. As many as two hundred animals were needed to make a single book.

.. Rulers also fretted how rising literacy and access to new ideas might affect their populations.

.. But Europe lagged behind. It’s unclear why the continent used parchment for so long, but like all areas that that were slower to adopt paper, this hindered its advancement. Up until the thirteenth century, many kings and princes were still illiterate. The greatest argument for why Europeans eventually switched to paper is because it was cheap. They first used it to make better Bibles, then quickly learned to rely on it for other obsessions, like money and banking.

.. a major subplot: people complaining about change. “As with every other new technology, there were those who were disdainful,” he writes, “some who thought it was barbarism, some who thought it was the end of civilization, and some who thought it was a threat to their jobs.”

.. Kurlansky illustrates his points with journalism, an industry whose fate is tied to the history of paper more than any other.

.. In the next decades, cheaper paper meant a transition from broadsides to pamphlets, which were longer and more reflective. This came just in time to enable writers like Thomas Paine ..

.. As Kurlansky writes, it’s merely a response to our demands: faster, cheaper, and “an innate desire for connection.”

 

 

How (Not) to Pitch

This Slate piece giving advice to entry-level job applicants in journalism about how to get their cover letters noticed made me think I ought to share a similar advice piece for new freelancers I put together for a women in media list-serv I’m on, inspired by the frequent and unnecessarily life-complicating errors of form I’d seen come in over the transom over the years, and some frequently asked questions about what can be an opaque process to newbies. Here are some basic rules to live by for people on the outside looking in.