{"id":39923,"date":"2018-10-31T06:21:00","date_gmt":"2018-10-31T11:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=39923"},"modified":"2018-10-31T06:21:00","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T11:21:00","slug":"why-is-social-media-so-toxic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=39923","title":{"rendered":"Why Is Social Media So Toxic?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why Is Social Media So Toxic?<\/a><\/h3>\n

The desire to improve our social standing is natural. What’s unnatural is the toxicity of doing so through social media.<\/i><\/p>\n

It seems self-evident that the divisiveness that characterizes this juncture of American history is manifesting profound social and economic disorders that have little to do with politics.<\/b> In this context, social media isn’t the source of the fire, it’s more like the gasoline that’s being tossed on top of the dry timber.<\/p>\n

My thinking on social media’s toxic nature has been heavily influenced by long conversations with my friend GFB, who persuaded me that my initial dismissal of Facebook’s influence was misplaced.<\/p>\n

Our views of all media, traditional, alternative and social, is of course heavily influenced by our own participation \/ consumption of each type of media.<\/b>Those who watch very little corporate-media broadcast “news” find the entire phenomenon very bizarre and easily mocked, and the same holds true for those who do not have any social media accounts: the whole phenomenon seems bizarre and easy to mock.<\/p>\n

As for alternative media, many people accustomed to traditional media have never visited a single blog or listened to a single podcast.<\/p>\n

Part of my job, as it were, is to monitor all three basic flavors of mass media, and do so as objectively as I can, which is to say, seek out representative narratives and commentaries across the full political and social spectra of each media.<\/p>\n

So why is social media so toxic to healthy dialog and tolerance, and to those who live much of their lives via social media?<\/b> I think we can discern several dynamics that direct the entire social media space.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why Is Social Media So Toxic? The desire to improve our social standing is natural. What’s unnatural is the toxicity of doing so through social media. It seems self-evident that the divisiveness that characterizes this juncture of American history is manifesting profound social and economic disorders that have little to do with politics. In this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[127,169,512,587,10588,1169],"class_list":["post-39923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-charles-hugh-smith","tag-corporate-media","tag-media","tag-of-two-minds","tag-social-disorder","tag-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39923"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39924,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39923\/revisions\/39924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}