Any topic (writer’s choice)

In a nutshell, here is what I am asking you to do for this assignment: pick one (or two or three, if you want) of Jaron Laniers arguments against social media (as he makes them in the book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now) elaborate (or, if you dont like his argument, rebut) it/them using your personal experience with social media to make your argument.

In some ways, Laniers arguments follow the forms of older media studies. For example, if you read his acknowledgments (titled Thanks-Yous in the book), you will find that he modeled his book on a classic of television studies, Jerry Mandlers 1978 book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. But, both Mandlers book and Laniers book are not models many of us can follow because they were both in the business they are critiquing. Mandler was an advertising executive before he wrote that book. Lanier, in his text, makes it clear that he is a critic, but also one of the technologists who has made the mess he is critiquing. Thus, if we look again at his acknowledgments we find that he was an employee of Microsoft!

The pivotal question for this assignment is how can one make an argument like or against those of Lanier without being an insider/outsider, a critic and a perpetrator of that which is being critiqued? The answer, in the abstract, is that we have to work from our own experience.

What to do:

1. There are two kinds of personal experience I want you to research and inventory for the sake of the argument you will make in your paper: (a) gather the data that is being gather about you by social media sites. I want you to be very expansive about what you consider to be a social media site because most commercial sites have adopted at least some of the technologies and business models of sites that are purely social media sites. And, (b) identify key habits in your everyday life that are due to social media or parasitically attached to by social media. In Laniers words Something entirely new is happening in the world. Just in the last five or ten years, nearly everyone started to carry a little device called a smartphone on their person all the time thats suitable for algorithmic behavior modification. A lot of us are also using related devices called smart speakers on our kitchen counters or in our car dashboards. Were being tracked and measured constantly, and receiving engineered feedback all the time (p. 5). So the first thing to do is to circumscribe the extent of what you will write about for this paper. Inventory your mobile devices (e.g., phone, laptop, tablet, etc.) and decide which of them, or which subset of them, you will be paying attention to. Then, inventory your social media accounts (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Google, etc.) and do the same with them: which will you focus on?

2. Work your way through the series of exercises on the Data Detox site: https://datadetox.myshadow.org/en/home Supplement these exercises with some of the suggestions Brian Kernighan makes in Chapter 11 in his discussion of tracking; e.g., turning cookies on and off in your browser, installing something like Ghostery, etc. What you are aiming for here is a better understanding of how the social media sites are profiling you.

3. Diagnose and describe your social media habits. How many hours a day do you spend on Instagram? When do you go online? When do you quit? How do you surf from item to item? New York Times journalist Charles Duhigg wrote a book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, that gives a very clear model for how to do this diagnosis. Duhigg tells us that there are three parts to our habits: (a) a cue or trigger; (b) a routine; and, (c) a reward. Thus, for instance, he talks about trying to quit an afternoon snacking habit he had of wandering into the cafeteria to buy and eat a cookie. He was not doing this every day at work because of some deliberate decision he was carefully making. It might have been a decision at one time, but it had developed into a sort of unthinking habit. He worked to figure out his cue: what triggered him to get up from his desk and start his trek to the cafeteria every day? He observed his routine: buy a cookie and wander around the cafeteria eating the cookie and talk with friends. And then –this was the hardest part to diagnose — he identified the reward. What was he after? A sugar rush? A distraction from his work? A time to socialize with friends? What you are aiming for in this part of the assignment is to identify your habits (their respective cues, routines, and rewards) that are interwoven into your everyday life and that pull you into and keep you in social media.

4. Now connect 2 and 3. How is the data collected about you by the social media sites driving or changing your personal habits? For example, when I buy a book on Amazon, the site gives me a list of other books I might want to buy and this list, sometimes, triggers me to buy a second book.

5. Consider how you might change your habits so that you are not so vulnerable to the manipulations of social media. Can you disconnect a trigger or cue (e.g., uncheck push notifications on your phone)? Can you substitute a different routine? Might you get the same reward doing something else? For instance, Duhigg discovers that the reward he desires is just some time to socialize and so he does not have to buy a cookie to get that reward.

6. Now consider how social media should be changed so that it does not inculcate bad habits or so that it actually creates habits that are good for us. The later, for instance, is what various new health technologies, like FitBit, seem to be trying to do. Lanier seems to think that most social media are irredeemable because their business model is so problematic. Here is where I would like you to spend the bulk of your writing time: Can you argue for or against Lanier, for or against the specific social media you use, by either extending his arguments or rebutting his arguments using your own experience?

7. You will need to clearly state at the beginning of your paper which of Laniers arguments you will be engaging with and how: Are you arguing with him or against him? Then, you will need to make it clear which social media, which data collection practices, which business models you will be focusing on. Your argument should be different from Laniers in two ways: it should draw from your own experience; and it should be more specific by focusing on, for example, just Facebook and its products and not, as Lanier does, on all of social media.

8. Grading will be done in a manner similar to the grading of paper #2. The paper will be graded according to the following criteria:

(a) Spelling and grammar count! We will take off points for poor proofreading.

(b) the quality and extent of your research;

(c) the clarity of your argument: Make your point right up front and then extend your argument in the body of the paper;

(d) the skill with which you weave your references into your argument: This time much of what you will be using as references will be from your primary research done to discover how you are being profiled by social media and to discover and reflect on your own habits. So, you might have some other references (e.g., secondary sources like Duhiggs book might be useful), but many of your references are likely to come from your own discoveries.

 

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