Stats for nerds
1recommend
3mentions
3people
2022–2024years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- From the author of the extremely well received Meme Wars, Joan Donovan.
Very nice contrast versus Facebook Files. Much appreciate this, as a good tocuhstone article for the times & happenings.
- So, I'll start off by saying I recommend a different approach than what I often see, with book recommendations.
Usually there's this hope that there's one book that's going to be THE book that kicks your social media addiction. Like imagine a Harvard psychiatrist wrote a book called "Social Media: The Evidence Against It." You read it, you raise a hand to your forehead saying "My God" or whatever and then you delete Twitter/Insta/Facebook forever. I don't think that's realistic.
What works however - and it really does work! - is to read a series of these books that really force your attention on to these abstractions (social media, addictiveness, your own relationship to it) and gently, gradually, distances you from them. It's not a one-book solution. It's multiple books, which are each slowly reshaping how you think about the Internet and how you use it, a little piece at a time.
I think the book cited above, "Irresistible", looks great, and I plan to read it (though I have not).
The ones I have read are: Smith's "Traffic", which isn't so much about addiction per se, but about how the game for traffic is played, by people who played it, the incentives for it; "Meme Wars" by Donovan, about memes and their effects on culture & politics (kind of adjacent to Reeve's "Black Pill", which I also read); and then multiple others which I won't cite here, which just made me think more about my relationship to culture, the good parts which I wanted to amplify vs. the bad parts of "mindlessly scrolling on the Internet."
I also thought Netflix's "The Social Dilemma" was good, for shining a spotlight on your relationship to these platforms and how you relate to them.
Note that you could pass on all of these books and honestly that would be okay with me. In a way that most important thing is to read a book that really immerses you in the mechanics of what you're doing when you're on tech platforms and the negative aspects of that (which I think we all know - spending too long on them, wasting time, negative self-image, etc). Over time, reading books like that release you from the grip of social media & the algorithms. If nothing else, they loosen it, which is helpful.
- so much drama, but I was not learning enough about what is actually going on so I did some simple searching.
TL;DR if you believe that there is a (quoting Hillary Clinton) "vast right-wing conspiracy" that the govt, media, social media, and academia should be coordinated and marshalled to contain, you're on her side. She is the one who figured out that Jan 6th was "in favor of" Trump, see below. But the skullduggery may be of a more pure nefarious nature, she had a non faculty staff position and got fired, but she wants to be treated as an "academic" in the sense of the academic freedom that goes with professorships.
Here's her wikipedia page trimmed down to essentials.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Donovan
Donovan's expertise is in examining internet and technology studies, online extremism, media manipulation, and disinformation campaigns
As Director, she published a number of impactful research papers and books.
Donovan co-wrote a widely-read study that discovered that a significant number of participants in the January 6 attack on the Capitol were driven by their support for President Trump.
In September of the same year, Donovan released a book titled "Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America," which explores the spread of right-wing political conspiracy theories through online media.
Donovan earned her PhD in Sociology and Science Studies from UCSD, and was a postdoc at the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA where her expertise was social movements, technology, and white supremacist's use of DNA ancestry tests.
She later held the role of Research Lead for the Media Manipulation Initiative at Data and Society, and mapped how interest groups, governments, political operatives, corporations, and others use the internet and media to disrupt social institutions.
Donovan went on to lead the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard Kennedy School and teach the class Media Manipulation and Disinformation Campaigns.
She joined the Boston University College of Communication in September 2023 as a tenure-track assistant professor.
Donovan has authored over 35 articles, paper, and books [10] including:
How news organizations should cover white supremacist shootings, PBS NewsHour
Big Tech Companies Are Struggling With How To Best Police Their Platforms
Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives
Navigating the Tech Stack: When, Where and How Should we Moderate Content?
Toward a Militant Ethnography of Infrastructure: Cybercartographies of Order, Scale, and Scope across the Occupy Movement.
