LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
And it polarizes our politics by allowing us all – no matter how wrong we are about a political issue – to find a large, enthusiastic group of people who are even wronger. But those are the small problems with social media. There’s a bigger problem. Consider just the top-six, Internet social networks... • Facebook has 2.3 billion users. • YouTube has 1.9 billion users. • WhatsApp has 1.5 billion users. • Facebook Messenger has 1.3 billion. • WeChat has 1 billion. • Instagram has another billion. Plus, there are at least 16 other social networks with more than 100 million users each. Do the math. No, don’t. Stop the math! Quit adding. With the top six, we’ve already reached a tally of 9 billion social media accounts... And there are only 7.5 billion people on the planet earth... We’ve run out of things to talk about... 1.5 billion social media posts ago. The first widely functional social media network, SixDegrees, wasn’t introduced until 1997. At the height of its popularity, it had 3.5 million subscribers. But, in the brief two decades since, we’ve created a world where we can hear what everybody has got to say. Nobody’s got that much to say. Social media is CB radio: “Breaker, breaker,
UP It makes our kids into victims or perpetrators of bullying, depending on whether our kids are dorks or jerks... and in my experience every kid is both. Social media comes in for a lot of criticism... The big corporations who operate social media platforms have the ethics of an opioid- addicted Oxycontin pharmaceutical sales rep. User privacy equates to getting a prostate exam in the middle of Times Square on New Year’s Eve while dropping trou’ between Christina Aguilera and Ryan Seacrest. Social media makes us easy victims of fraud and financial manipulation. (Darn it! Of all the Nigerian government officials, I spam- blocked the one who actually had $100 million to wire to my bank account.) Social media is giving young people a bad case of “phone face” with a big, permanent Samsung Galaxy Note 9 pimple between their eyes.
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American Consequences
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