Slashdot Mirror
'Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It.' (nytimes.com)
The New York Times ran a strong opinion piece that talks about one critical reason why everyone should quit social media: your career is dependent on it. The other argues that by spending time on social media and sharing our thoughts, we are demeaning the value of our work, our ideas. (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternate source.) Select excerpts from the story follows:In a capitalist economy, the market rewards things that are rare and valuable. Social media use is decidedly not rare or valuable. Any 16-year-old with a smartphone can invent a hashtag or repost a viral article. The idea that if you engage in enough of this low-value activity, it will somehow add up to something of high value in your career is the same dubious alchemy that forms the core of most snake oil and flimflam in business. Professional success is hard, but it's not complicated. The foundation to achievement and fulfillment, almost without exception, requires that you hone a useful craft and then apply it to things that people care about. [...] Interesting opportunities and useful connections are not as scarce as social media proponents claim. In my own professional life, for example, as I improved my standing as an academic and a writer, I began receiving more interesting opportunities than I could handle. As you become more valuable to the marketplace, good things will find you. To be clear, I'm not arguing that new opportunities and connections are unimportant. I'm instead arguing that you don't need social media's help to attract them. My second objection concerns the idea that social media is harmless. Consider that the ability to concentrate without distraction on hard tasks is becoming increasingly valuable in an increasingly complicated economy. Social media weakens this skill because it's engineered to be addictive. The more you use social media in the way it's designed to be used -- persistently throughout your waking hours -- the more your brain learns to crave a quick hit of stimulus at the slightest hint of boredom. Once this Pavlovian connection is solidified, it becomes hard to give difficult tasks the unbroken concentration they require, and your brain simply won't tolerate such a long period without a fix. Indeed, part of my own rejection of social media comes from this fear that these services will diminish my ability to concentrate -- the skill on which I make my living. A dedication to cultivating your social media brand is a fundamentally passive approach to professional advancement. It diverts your time and attention away from producing work that matters and toward convincing the world that you matter. The latter activity is seductive, especially for many members of my generation who were raised on this message, but it can be disastrously counterproductive.
After much whining that fake news on Facebook swung the election, now the NYT is trying to discourage people from using social media at all.
Yup, stick to reliable journalists like them so you get the message they want you to get.
Check the source - nytimes.com. Fake news! How do you spot fake news? Are they the same people cheering on the Hamilton cast for using the stage to push a political agenda? And yet they are upset at Kanye for using the stage to push a political agenda? Fake news!
Did your news tell you that Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Aso said today, "There's no point in Japan making policy based on the guesses of American newspapers when they're always wrong"? Why didn't your news tell you this? Maybe your news is fake news!
Is your news telling you Sessions is racist and yet he marched at Selma with civil rights leaders? Fake news!
If your news outlet didn't mention that Hillary got caught on tape rigging the 2006 Palestinian elections, you were definitely watching fake news.
Most damning of all, is your news telling you not to listen to alternative sources of news? THINK about that one for a minute. Who on earth would ever say something like that? Fake news, that's who.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!