As a sufferer of "have to read news I don't need and have to engage with commenters" syndrome, I think it comes down to anxiety and curiosity. We just gotta know if there's a danger around the corner, over the next hill.
It's the same as gambling, and social media has been compared to slot machines: they've found a hack into the backdoor …
As a sufferer of "have to read news I don't need and have to engage with commenters" syndrome, I think it comes down to anxiety and curiosity. We just gotta know if there's a danger around the corner, over the next hill.
It's the same as gambling, and social media has been compared to slot machines: they've found a hack into the backdoor of human decision-making, hitting us in weaknesses: curiosity, status anxiety, and that dopamine drip that comes from reading one affirming tidbit after another: "Oooh, sick burn, George Takei! That'll show 'em!"
Anybody still on Twitter for any reason but the coldest calculations about commercial promotion can "explain" to you why they "have" to stay on Twitter.
Absolutely. Just the notion of Twitter as "the public square" — despite being used by just a tiny fraction of the public at large, and dominated by a small group of power-users that tend towards the most intense and polarizing rhetoric — exposes just how bizarre it is that we've created these artificial communities that seem bigger than they really are.
As a sufferer of "have to read news I don't need and have to engage with commenters" syndrome, I think it comes down to anxiety and curiosity. We just gotta know if there's a danger around the corner, over the next hill.
It's the same as gambling, and social media has been compared to slot machines: they've found a hack into the backdoor of human decision-making, hitting us in weaknesses: curiosity, status anxiety, and that dopamine drip that comes from reading one affirming tidbit after another: "Oooh, sick burn, George Takei! That'll show 'em!"
Anybody still on Twitter for any reason but the coldest calculations about commercial promotion can "explain" to you why they "have" to stay on Twitter.
Absolutely. Just the notion of Twitter as "the public square" — despite being used by just a tiny fraction of the public at large, and dominated by a small group of power-users that tend towards the most intense and polarizing rhetoric — exposes just how bizarre it is that we've created these artificial communities that seem bigger than they really are.