WHY I’M NOT ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER

Along with all the triviality (hey, “look at my pizza” posts) and stupidity (everyone is an expert), Alan Jacobs adds further reasons:

“I have come to believe that it is impossible for anyone who is regularly on social media to have a balanced and accurate understanding of what is happening in the world. To follow a minute-by-minute cycle of news is to be constantly threatened by illusion. So I’m not just staying off Twitter, I’m cutting back on the news sites in my RSS feed, and deleting browser bookmarks to newspapers. Instead, I am turning more of my attention to monthly magazines, quarterly journals, and books. I’m trying to get a somewhat longer view of things — trying to start thinking about issues one when some of the basic facts about them have been sorted out. Taking the short view has burned me far too many times; I’m going to try to prevent that from happening ever again (even if I will sometimes fail). And if once in a while I end up fighting a battle in a war that has already ended … I can live with that.”

http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2017/01/recency-illusions.html

3 thoughts on “WHY I’M NOT ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER

  1. Jeannie Love

    Oh, how I would like to see more articles like this one ‘out there in the mainstream’ because I appear as a ‘lone ranger’ to most around me and that includes my peers in their 60’s and 70’s. Most of us do NOT like to be alone on an issue and appear ‘old fashioned’ in the negative sense of the word.

    Reply

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