Social media is the new commuting
Just as wasteful, that is.
In the early 2000s, when I had an office job, I tried for a couple of months to track with a spreadsheet what my real hourly wage was if, on top of real work, I added the time spent in project meetings, other dilbert-esque activities and telecommuting.
The result was so depressing that I erased the spreadsheet from my computer.
About ten years after that exercise of mine, ZdNet asked “Can social media improve your commute?", but they were talking of decreasing one’s stress by connecting with fellow commuters.
Now, after one year mostly in lockdown, I have realized that many people are not just wasting on social media just as much time as they previously wasted on commuting: they are also doing exactly the same thing they used to do inside buses and subway wagons:
closed in individual, semi-transparent bubbles, watching the others in their separate ones, without any real communication happening, or wish for it.
This won’t revolutionize philosophy for sure, but it seems true: Social media is like commuting, and it is somehow what John lennon said:
what happens while you would or should be doing something else.
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
I do it because YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you.
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