(National Review) -- Imagine a world without social media. It’s easy if you try.
Well, scratch that: It’s actually not easy at all. Odds are, you’re kind of addicted to social media, whether you admit it or not. According to Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley virtual-reality pioneer and author of the new book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, that addiction might be eroding your soul.
We’ll get to the book, which is worth reading, in a moment. But before that, let’s try to imagine that world without social media, if only for sport.
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Without social media, for instance, would the social train wreck surrounding the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va. — you know, the one that banished Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family this week — have devolved into the embarrassing conflagration it is today? Sure, various people acted like jerks, but people have occasionally acted like jerks since the beginning of time. But let’s imagine l’affaire Red Hen without “the fire and ire of social media,” as the Washington Post aptly put it. It’s rather enlightening.
