Antisocial Media Quotes

“Facebook is the paradigmatic distillation of the Silicon Valley ideology.”
― Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

“I’ve certainly scolded myself for an hour or more blown on a flow of dog videos, family updates, shallow political expressions, and pleas for funds. Every one of those items has some value to me, just as each potato chip delivers some pleasure, some flavor. I savor them. But I lose count. And upon reflection I feel just horrible. But the thing is, snack foods are explicitly designed to make us behave this way. Food producers have studied, mastered, and tinkered with the ratios of salt, sugar, and fat to keep us coming back, even when the taste of much of the food is unremarkable. Facebook is designed to be habit-forming in just the same way.”
― Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

“Extremism will generate both positive and negative reactions, or “engagements.” Facebook measures engagement by the number of clicks, “likes,” shares, and comments. This design feature—or flaw, if you care about the quality of knowledge and debate—ensures that the most inflammatory material will travel the farthest and the fastest. Sober, measured accounts of the world have no chance on Facebook. And when Facebook dominates our sense of the world and our social circles, we all potentially become carriers of extremist nonsense”
― Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

“To believe that market competition curbs the excesses of big, powerful corporations demands a leap of faith that history does not support. It's a peculiar form of market fundamentalism that I can no longer embrace.”
― Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

“Even when we post and share demonstrably false stories and claims we do so to declare our affiliation, to assert that our social bonds mean more to us than the question of truth. This fact should give us pause. How can we train billions of people to value truth over their cultural membership when the question of truth holds little at stake for them and the question of social membership holds so much?”
― Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

“Facebook does not favor hatred. But hatred favors Facebook”
― Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

“By timbre, temperament, and sheer force of personality, Donald Trump is the ideal manifestation of Facebook culture. Trump himself uses Twitter habitually both as a bully pulpit and as an antenna for reaction to his expressions. Twitter has a limited reach among the American public, and his off-the-cuff, unpracticed, and untested expressions could do him more harm than good. But Facebook, with its deep penetration into American minds and lives, is Trump’s natural habitat. On Facebook his staff makes sure Trump expresses himself in short, strong bursts of indignation or approval. Trump has always been visually deft but close to illiterate. His attention span runs as quickly and frenetically as a Facebook News Feed. After a decade of deep and constant engagement with Facebook, Americans have been conditioned to experience the world Trump style. It’s almost as if Trump were designed for Facebook and Facebook were designed for him.

Facebook helped make America ready for Trump.”
― Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

“We have a long way to go before humanity is constantly connected to and monitored by a handful of companies. Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Oculus Rift are currently just vanity products for the wealthiest among us. But the model is clear: the operating system of our lives would be about our bodies, our consciousness, our decisions. Attention would be optional. Power would be more concentrated, and manipulation constant. That’s a world with no patience for autonomy and no space for democracy. It would be a lazy, narcotic world. It would not be some dystopian state of mass slavery, as portrayed in The Matrix. It would be kind of dull and kind of fun. It would be an existence like that in Brave New World.”
― Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

“The pinnacle of the struggle for attention, which we are promised will surely pay off through wealth and fame, is the TED Talk. Purposely informal and limited to eighteen minutes, these punchy, pithy talks are meant to inspire and entertain. They don’t invite deliberation or debate. They don’t demand immersion or even background reading. They are capsules of knowledge. To deliver a TED Talk, however, is the apex of self-branding. And, not coincidentally, one of the major ways people discover TED Talks and other self-promotional videos is through Facebook.”
― Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

“Neil Postman reminded us that the advent of the telegraph, with its radically truncated economy of prose, created a whole new language—that of headlines: “sensational, fragmented, impersonal.” Postman blamed the telegraph for introducing us to this choppy, discontinuous method of learning that things happen, often far away, with no clear way of making sense of them or weighing their relative importance to our lives or future. “To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.”
― Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

“Teaching, I soon learned, was a deliberate dance, a constant running conversation, a pleasure.”
― Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

“A global system that links 2.2. billion people across hundreds of countries, allows every user to post content indiscriminately, develops algorithms that favor highly charged content, and is dependent on a self-service advertising system that precisely target ads using massive surveillance and elaborate personal dossiers cannot be reformed at the edges.”
― Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy