Zadie Smith on Social Media
the most recent episode of Ezra Klein featured author Zadie Smith, who gave a summary of social media and phones which has been bouncing around my head since I heard it:
the facts of this technology is that it was designed as and is intended to be a behaviour modification system. That is the right term for it … the phone tells me exactly what to think about, where to think about it and often how to think about it, and it’s not even to me the content of those thoughts, like there’s a lot of emphasis put on the kind of politics to express on these platforms to the right or to the left. To me, it’s the structure. It’s not the content of what’s on them. It’s that it’s structured in a certain way. That an argument is this long that there are two sides to every debate that they must be in fierce contest with each other is actually structuring the way you think about thought…
I don’t think any one of my age who knows anyone they knew in 2008 thinks that that person has not been seriously modified. In many different directions but the fundamental modification is the same, and that’s okay, all mediums modify you. Books modify you, TV modifies you, radio modifies you, the social life of a 16th century village modifies you, but the question becomes who do you want to be modified by and to what degree? That’s my only question, and when I look at the people who have designed these things, what they want, what their aims are, what they think a human being is or should be…This machinery is not worthy of them. That’s the best way I can put it, and I speak of someone who grew up as an entirely TV addicted human. I love TV. I love reading. Modification is my bread and butter, and when the internet came, I was like, “Hallelujah. Finally, we’ve got a medium which isn’t made by the man or centralized. We’re just going to be like talking to each other, hanging out with each other. It’s going to be amazing.” That is not the internet that we have. That is not what occurred.