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translator: peter van de venreviewer: denise rq you probably don't realize that right now, you're actuallylooking at something quite rare. because i am a millennialcomputer scientist book author standing on a tedx stage, and yet, i've never hada social media account. how this happenedwas actually somewhat random. social media first came onto my radarwhen i was at college, my sophomore year of college,

this is when facebookarrived at our campus. and at the time, which wasright after the first dotcom bust, i had had a dorm room business,i'd had to shut it down in the bust, and then, suddenly, this other kidfrom harvard, named mark, had this product called facebookand people being excited about it. so in sort of a fit of somewhatimmature professional jealousy, i said, "i'm not going to use this thing. i won't help this kid's business;whatever's going to amount to." as i go along my life,i look up not long later,

and i see everyone i knowis hooked on this thing. and from the clarity you can get when you have some objectivity,some perspective on it, i realized this seemsa little bit dangerous. so i never signed up. i've never hada social media account since. so i'm here for two reasons;i want to deliver two messages. the first message i want to deliver is that even though i've never hada social media account,

i'm ok, you don't have to worry. it turns out i still have friends, i still know what's going on in the world; as a computer scientist i still collaborate with peopleall around the world, i'm still regularly exposedserendipitously to interesting ideas, and i rarely describe myselfas lacking entertainment options. so i've been ok,but i'd go even farther and say not only i am ok without social mediabut i think i'm actually better off.

i think i'm happier, i think i findmore sustainability in my life, and i think i've beenmore successful professionally because i don't use social media. so my second goal here on stage is try to convince more of youto believe the same thing. let's see if i could actuallyconvince more of you that you too would be better offif you quit social media. so, if the theme of this tedx eventis "future tense," i guess, in other words,this would be my vision of the future,

would be one in which fewer peopleactually use social media. that's a big claim,i think i need to back it up. so i thought, what i would do is take the three mostcommon objections i hear when i suggest to peoplethat they quit social media, and then for each of these objections,i'll try to defuse the hype and see if i can actuallypush in some more reality. this is the firstmost common objection i hear. that's not a hermit,

that's actually a hipster web developerdown from 8th street; i'm not sure. hipster or hermit?sometimes it's hard to tell. this first objection goes as follows, "cal, social media is oneof the fundamental technologies of the 21st century. to reject social media would bean act of extreme [bloodism]. it would be like riding to workon a horse or using a rotary phone. i can't takesuch a big stance in my life." my reaction to that objectionis i think that is nonsense.

social media is nota fundamental technology. it leveragessome fundamental technologies, but it's better understood as this. which is to say,it's a source of entertainment, it's an entertainment product. the way that technologistjaron lanier puts it is that these companiesoffer you shiny treats in exchange for minutes of your attentionand bites of your personal data, which can then be packaged up and sold.

so to say that you don't use social mediashould not be a large social stance, it's just rejecting one formof entertainment for others. there should be no morecontroversial than saying, "i don't like newspapers,i like to get my news from magazines," or "i prefer to watch cable series,as opposed to network television series." it's not a major politicalor social stance to say you don't use this product. my use of the slot machine imageup here also is not accidental because if you look a little bit closerat these technologies,

it's not just that they'rea source of entertainment but they're a somewhatunsavory source of entertainment. we now know that manyof the major social media companies hire individualscalled attention engineers, who borrow principlesfrom las vegas casino gambling, among other places, to try to make these productsas addictive as possible. that is the desireduse case of these products: is that you use it in an addictive fashionbecause that maximizes the profit

that can be extractedfrom your attention and data. so it's not a fundamental technology, it's just a source of entertainment,one among many, and it's somewhat unsavoryif you look a little bit closer. here's the second common objection i hear when i suggest that peoplequit social media. the objection goes as follows, "cal, i can't quit social media because it is vital to my successin the 21st century economy.

if i do not have a well-cultivatedsocial media brand, people won't know who i am,people won't be able to find me, opportunities won't come my way, and i will effectivelydisappear from the economy." again my reaction is once again: this objection also is nonsense. i recently published this book that draws on multipledifferent strands of evidence to make the point that,in a competitive 21st century economy,

what the market values is the ability to produce thingsthat are rare and are valuable. if you produce somethingthat's rare and valuable, the market will value that. what the market dismisses,for the most part, are activities that are easy to replicateand produce a small amount of value. well, social media use is the epitome of an easy to replicate activitythat doesn't produce a lot of value; it's something that any six-year-oldwith a smartphone can do.

by definition, the market is not going to givea lot of value to those behaviors. it's instead going to rewardthe deep, concentrated work required to build real skills and to applythose skills to produce things - like a craftsman - that are rare and that are valuable. to put it another way:if you can write an elegant algorithm, if you can write a legal briefthat can change a case, if you can write a thousand words of prose

that's going to fixatea reader right to the end; if you can look at a sea of ambiguous data and apply statistics,and pull out insights that could transform a business strategy, if you can do these type of activitieswhich require deep work, that produce outcomesthat are rare and valuable, people will find you. you will be able to write your own ticket, and build the foundation of a meaningfuland successful professional life,

regardless of how manyinstagram followers you have. this is the third comment objection i hear when i suggest to peoplethat they quit social media; in some sense, i think it might beone of the most important. this objection goes as follows, "cal, maybe i agree, maybe you're right;it's not a fundamental technology. maybe using social media is notat the core of my professional success. but, you know what? it's harmless, i have some fun on it- weird: twitter's funny -

i don't even use it that much,i'm a first adopter, it's kind of interesting to try it out, and maybe i might miss outsomething if i don't use it. what's the harm?" again, i look back and i say:this objection also is nonsense. in this case, what it misses iswhat i think is a very important reality that we need to talk about more frankly, which is that social media brings with it multiple, well-documented,and significant harms.

we actually have to confrontthese harms head-on when trying to make decisions about whether or notwe embrace this technology and let it into our lives. one of these harmsthat we know this technology brings has to do with your professional success. i just argued beforethat the ability to focus intensely, to produce thingsthat are rare and valuable, to hone skills the market place value on,

that this iswhat will matter in our economy. but right before that, i argued that social media toolsare designed to be addictive. the actual designeddesired-use case of these tools is that you fragment your attentionas much as possible throughout your waking hours; that's how these toolsare designed to use. we have a growing amountof research which tells us that if you spendlarge portions of your day

in a state of fragmented attention - large portions of your day,breaking up your attention, to take a quick glance, to just check,- "let me quickly look at instagram" - that this can permanently reduceyour capacity for concentration. in other words, you couldpermanently reduce your capacity to do exactly the type of deep effort that we're finding to bemore and more necessary in an increasingly competitive economy. so social media use is not harmless,

it can actually havea significant negative impact on your ability to thrive in the economy. i'm especially worried about thiswhen we look at the younger generation, which is the most saturatedin this technology. if you lose your abilityto sustain concentration, you're going to become less and lessrelevant to this economy. there's also psychological harmsthat are well documented that social media brings,that we do need to address. we know from the research literaturethat the more you use social media,

the more likely you areto feel lonely or isolated. we know that the constant exposure to your friends carefully curated,positive portrayals of their life can leave you to feel inadequate,and can increase rates of depression. and something i think we're going to behearing more about in the near future is that there's a fundamental mismatch between the way our brains are wired and this behaviorof exposing yourself to stimuli with intermittent rewardsthroughout all of your waking hours.

it's one thing to spend a couple of hoursat a slot machine in las vegas, but if you bring one with you,and you pull that handle all day long, from when you wake up to when you goto bed: we're not wired from it. it short-circuits the brain, and we're starting to findit has actual cognitive consequences, one of them being this sort ofpervasive background hum of anxiety. the canary in the coal mine for this issueis actually college campuses. if you talk to mental health expertson college campuses, they'll tell you that along with the riseof ubiquitous smartphone use

and social media useamong the students on the campus, came an explosion of anxiety-relateddisorders on those campuses. that's the canary in the coal mine. this type of behavioris a mismatch for our brain wiring and can make you feel miserable. so there's real cost to social media use; which means when you're trying to decide,"should i use this or not?", saying it's harmless is not enough. you actually have to identifya significantly positive, clear benefit

that can outweigh these potential,completely non-trivial harms. people often ask, "ok, but what is life likewithout social media?" that can actually bea little bit scary to think about. according to peoplewho went through this process, there can be a few difficult weeks. it actually is like a true detox process. the first two weeks can be uncomfortable: you feel a little bit anxious,you feel like you're missing a limb.

but after that, things settle down, and actually, life after social mediacan be quite positive. there's two things i can report backfrom the world of no social media use. first, it can be quite productive. i'm a professor at a research institution,i've written five books, i rarely work past 5 pm on a weekday. part of the way i'm tryingto able to pull that off is because it turns out,if you treat your attention with respect, - so you don't fragment it;you allow it to stay whole,

you preserve your concentration - when it comes time to work you can do one thing after another,and do it with intensity, and intensity can be traded for time. it's surprising how muchyou can get done in a eight-hour day if you're able to give each thingintense concentration after another. something else i can report backfrom life without social media is that outside of work,things can be quite peaceful. i often joke i'd be very comfortablebeing a 1930s farmer,

because if you look at my leisure time, i read the newspaperwhile the sun comes up; i listen to baseball on the radio; i honest-to-god sit in a leather chair and read hardcover books at nightafter my kids go to bed. it sounds old-fashioned,but they were onto something back then. it's actually a restorative, peaceful wayto actually spend your time out of work. you don't havethe constant hum of stimuli, and the background hum of anxietythat comes along with that.

so life without social mediais really not so bad. if you pull together these threads,you see my full argument that not everyone, but certainlymuch more people than right now, much more peopleshould not be using social media. that's because we can first, to summarize, discard with the main concerns that it's a fundamentaltechnology you have to use. nonsense: it's a slot machinein your phone. we can discard with this notionthat you won't get a job without it.

nonsense: anything a six-year-oldwith a smartphone can do is not going to bewhat the market rewards. and then i emphasized the pointthat there's real harms with it. so it's not just harmless. you really would have to havea significant benefit before you would saythis trade-off is worth it. finally i noted,that life without social media: there's real positives associated with it. so i'm hoping that when many of youactually go through this same calculus,

you'll at least considerthe perspective i'm making right now, which is: many more peoplewould be much better off if they didn't use this technology. some of you might disagree, some of you might have scathingbut accurate critiques of me and my points, and of course, i welcomeall negative feedback. i just ask that you directyour comments towards twitter. thank you.

(applause)

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