Vanessa's Blog
09/20/23
I agree with Jaron Lainer that social media ruins our lives. I think in the beginning social media was less addicting and was more so to connect with the world. But now as Jaron mentions all the ills with social media the benefits have decreased. One con of social media is the creators of these sites what you to get addicted so they monitor your behavior on sites to create algorithms to suck you in. He goes on to mention that these sites are manipulative becuase the main purpose is to exploit our interest with no regrad on the well being of the user. I think social media could be fixed if the creators of these companies cared about the well being of the users, but big social media companies don't care. To tweak it selling our information would have to stop, more privacy on the interent, and the algorithms would be changed which would lower users screen time. All of this wouldn't benefit thr site. For example, Instagram is a social media site that tries to suck you into their algorithm. I could be looking at shoes on a completely different website and I'll go onto Instagram and see an ad for those same shoes or a similar one. Another example of how they try to suck you in, is how they monitor our behavior on the app. If you like or view certain profiles they keep track and create an explore page based on what they have on you. These makes you more likely to stay on the app because it's addicting to keep scrolling on things you enjoy.I do think Lainers argument is convincing especially since there is evidence to back it up with he uses Facebook as an example. I think the best way to address this concern is to see what goes on inside of these companies. They are being addressed somewhere, there has been issues with TikTok and the US government becuase of privact issues. I have also seen a netflix series that shows and talks about how social media has us wrapped. This caused alot of fear, although Lainer reccomends to delete all media and experience life without it I don't believe that will happen.