Ep. 371: Is it Finally Time to Leave Social Media?

Two days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, I sent a short essay to my newsletter. I I wrote it in about fifteen minutes, but it was about as as raw or as pointed as I ever get. The essay started like this. Those of us who study online culture like to use the phrase Twitter is not real life. But as we saw yet again this week, when the digital discourses fostered on services like Twitter or Blue Sky or TikTok do intersect with the real world, whether they originate from the left or the right, the results are often horrific. This should tell us all we need to know about these platforms. They are toxic and dehumanizing. They are responsible as much as any other force for the unraveling of civil society that seems to be accelerating. Alright. Then later in the essay, I reached the following conclusion. After troubling national events, there's often a public conversation about the appropriate way to respond. Well, here's one option to consider. Quit using these social platforms. Find other ways to keep up with the news or spread ideas or be entertained. Be a responsible grown up who does useful things, someone who serves real people in the real world. In the over two decades or so that I've been writing that newsletter, I don't think I've ever received as large or as positive of a response as I did for that post. I met something like 200 email replies and counting and nearly a 100 comments. The vast majority of this feedback is saying the same thing. Thank you. This was the final push I needed to finally quit these apps. Now this got me thinking. Our biggest problem with social media right now is not convincing people that it's bad. People know this. People don't love these platforms. They don't defend them the way they used to, but they're stuck in a sort of purgatory where they know it's bad, but they're not sure exactly why or whether it's something that maybe could be fixed or maybe something that's worse for other people than it is for them, so they stay where they are. They stay in the status quo waiting for someone to push them into a different pattern. Well, today, I wanna provide that push. I'm gonna put on my my techno critic professor hat and provide a precise and detailed explanation of how exactly the worst of these platforms impact us and why these problems are fundamental to these technologies and not something that we can easily fix, I wanna give you the ironclad case for why the most reasonable response for most people is to do what I recommend in my essay, to quit or good. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Today's episode, The Case for Quitting Social Media. Alright. So we need to start our conversation here by defining some terms. The phrase social media can mean a lot …