Antisocial Media
How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy
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"If you wanted to build a machine that would distribute propaganda to millions of people, distract them from important issues, energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, undermine respectable journalism, foster doubts about science, and engage in massive surveillance all at once, you would make something a lot like Facebook. Of course, none of that was part of the plan. In Antisocial Media, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life just a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging. It's an account of the hubris of good intentions, a missionary spirit, and an ideology that sees computer code as the universal solvent for all human problems...Both authoritative and trenchant, Antisocial Media shows how Facebook's mission went so wrong."--Book description, Amazon.com.
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Listened to this on audio from my library and bought the hardcover to highlight all the awesome information. Author did a great job in the first half of the book really delving into how FB has structured our social interactions with the closest people to us as well as those we haven't spoken to in decades. The biggest takeaway and one the author touches on multiple times in the segmented narrative, is that Zuckerberg's hubris in striving to create a more connected society has accomplished quite the opposite and instead made it easier for us to divide ourselves into FB Groups that only reinforce our thoughts and beliefs. There should be a better way to foster constructive commentary without it being a free-for-all without any consequence or distinction between actual fact and conspiratorial narratives.
