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Quit_social_media__Dr._Cal_Newport__TEDxTysons


Whisper Transcript | Transcript Only Page

00:00:00.000 | [ Music ]
00:00:14.000 | [ Silence ]
00:00:19.480 | [ Applause ]
00:00:25.480 | >> All right.
00:00:26.340 | So you probably don't realize
00:00:29.000 | that right now you're actually looking
00:00:30.200 | at something quite rare
00:00:31.120 | because I am a millennial computer scientist book author
00:00:36.740 | standing on a TED stage
00:00:38.780 | and yet I've never had a social media account.
00:00:40.880 | How this happened was actually somewhat random.
00:00:45.200 | You know, social media first came onto my radar when I was
00:00:48.000 | at college, my sophomore year of college.
00:00:49.620 | This is when Facebook arrived at our campus.
00:00:52.040 | And at the time, which was right after the first dot com bust,
00:00:55.500 | I had had a dorm room business.
00:00:57.820 | I had had to shut it down in the bust.
00:01:00.020 | And then suddenly this other kid from Harvard named Mark had this
00:01:03.280 | product called Facebook and people were getting excited
00:01:05.300 | about it.
00:01:05.700 | So it was sort of a fit
00:01:06.920 | of somewhat immature professional jealousy.
00:01:09.340 | I said I'm not going to use this thing.
00:01:10.420 | I'm not going to help this kid's business.
00:01:12.220 | What's it ever going to amount to?
00:01:13.220 | So as I go along my life, I look up not long later and I see
00:01:16.580 | that everyone I know is really hooked on this thing.
00:01:18.220 | And from the clarity you can get when you have some objectivity,
00:01:22.100 | some perspective on it, I realized this seems a little
00:01:25.020 | bit dangerous so I never signed up.
00:01:26.660 | I've never had a social media account since.
00:01:28.020 | So I'm here for two reasons.
00:01:30.660 | I want to deliver two messages.
00:01:32.480 | The first message I want to deliver is
00:01:34.560 | that even though I've never had a social media account, I'm okay.
00:01:38.600 | You don't have to worry.
00:01:39.860 | It turns out I still have friends.
00:01:43.020 | I still know what's going on in the world.
00:01:45.360 | As a computer scientist, I still collaborate with people all
00:01:48.720 | around the world.
00:01:49.460 | I'm still regularly exposed serendipitously
00:01:51.540 | to interesting ideas and I rarely describe myself
00:01:54.020 | as lacking in entertainment options.
00:01:56.900 | So I've been okay but I'd go even farther.
00:01:58.400 | I'd go even farther and say not only am I okay
00:02:01.420 | without social media but I think I'm actually better off.
00:02:03.760 | I think I'm happier.
00:02:05.660 | I think I find more sustainability in my life
00:02:09.240 | and I think I've been more successful professionally
00:02:12.100 | because I don't use social media.
00:02:13.320 | So my second goal here on stage is to try to convince more
00:02:17.940 | of you to believe the same thing.
00:02:20.300 | To see if I could actually convince more of you
00:02:23.560 | that you too would be better off if you quit social media.
00:02:26.720 | So if the theme of this TEDx event is future tense,
00:02:30.360 | I guess in other words this would be my vision
00:02:32.020 | of the future would be one
00:02:32.980 | in which fewer people actually use social media.
00:02:35.500 | Okay, so that's a big claim.
00:02:37.960 | I think I need to back it up some.
00:02:39.060 | I thought what I would do is take the three most common
00:02:42.820 | objections I hear when I suggest to people
00:02:44.840 | that they quit social media and then for each
00:02:47.140 | of these objections I'll try to defuse the hype and see
00:02:49.480 | if I can actually push in some more reality.
00:02:51.900 | So this is the first most common objection I hear.
00:02:56.000 | That's not a hermit, that's actually a hipster web
00:03:00.600 | developer down from 8th Street.
00:03:01.860 | I'm not sure.
00:03:02.320 | Hipster or hermit, sometimes it's hard to tell.
00:03:04.800 | So this first objection goes as follows.
00:03:08.560 | Cal, social media is one of the fundamental technologies
00:03:12.060 | of the 21st century.
00:03:13.300 | To reject social media would be an act of extreme bloodism.
00:03:17.080 | It would be like riding to work in a horse
00:03:19.500 | or using a rotary phone.
00:03:20.960 | I can't take such a big stance in my life.
00:03:23.360 | So my reaction to that objection is I think that is nonsense.
00:03:27.420 | Social media is not a fundamental technology.
00:03:30.620 | It leverages some fundamental technologies
00:03:33.260 | but it's better understood as this, which is to say it's a source
00:03:38.240 | of entertainment, it's an entertainment product.
00:03:39.940 | The way the technologist Jaron Lanier puts it is
00:03:43.080 | that these companies offer you shiny treats in exchange
00:03:47.880 | for minutes of your attention and bites
00:03:50.240 | of your personal data, which can then be packaged up and sold.
00:03:53.640 | So to say that you don't use social media should not be a
00:03:57.380 | large social stance, it's just rejecting one form
00:04:00.880 | of entertainment for others.
00:04:01.860 | It should be no more controversial
00:04:03.240 | than saying I don't like newspapers,
00:04:05.480 | I like to get my news from magazines.
00:04:06.900 | Or I prefer to watch cable series
00:04:09.480 | as opposed to network television series.
00:04:11.120 | It's not a major political or social stance
00:04:13.880 | to say you don't use this product.
00:04:16.160 | My use of the slot machine image up here also is not accidental
00:04:20.000 | because if you look a little bit closer at these technologies,
00:04:22.360 | it's not just that they're a source of entertainment
00:04:24.220 | but they're actually a somewhat unsavory source
00:04:26.020 | of entertainment.
00:04:26.580 | We now know that many of the major social media companies
00:04:29.840 | hire individuals called attention engineers
00:04:32.260 | who borrow principles from Las Vegas Casino Gambling among
00:04:35.320 | other places to try to make these products
00:04:38.200 | as addictive as possible.
00:04:39.500 | That is the desired use case of these products is
00:04:42.940 | that you use it in an addictive fashion
00:04:44.360 | because that maximizes the profit that can be extracted
00:04:47.540 | from your attention and data.
00:04:48.840 | So it's not a fundamental technology, it's just a source
00:04:52.360 | of entertainment, one among many and it's somewhat unsavory
00:04:54.780 | if you look a little bit closer.
00:04:55.720 | So here's the second common objection I hear when I suggest
00:05:01.040 | that people quit social media.
00:05:02.280 | The objection goes as follows.
00:05:03.300 | Cal, I can't quit social media because it is vital to my success
00:05:08.200 | in the 21st century economy.
00:05:09.820 | If I do not have a well-cultivated social media
00:05:12.720 | brand people won't know who I am, people won't be able
00:05:15.860 | to find me, opportunities won't come my way
00:05:18.340 | and I will effectively disappear from the economy.
00:05:21.520 | So again my reaction is once again,
00:05:23.940 | this objection also is nonsense.
00:05:26.720 | So I recently published this book that draws
00:05:30.980 | on multiple different strands of evidence to make the point
00:05:35.480 | that in a competitive 21st century economy what the market
00:05:40.100 | values is the ability to produce things
00:05:43.080 | that are rare and are valuable.
00:05:45.180 | You can produce something that's rare and is valuable,
00:05:48.560 | the market will value that.
00:05:49.860 | What the market dismisses for the most part are activities
00:05:53.740 | that are easy to replicate and produce a small amount of value.
00:05:56.720 | Well social media use is the epitome of an easy
00:06:01.920 | to replicate activity that does not directly produce a lot
00:06:04.220 | of value, it's something that any 16-year-old
00:06:05.820 | with a smartphone can do.
00:06:06.880 | By definition the market is not going
00:06:09.600 | to give a lot of value to those behaviors.
00:06:11.280 | It's instead going to reward the deep concentrated work required
00:06:15.060 | to build real skills and to apply those skills
00:06:18.420 | to produce things like a craftsman
00:06:20.080 | that are rare and that are valuable.
00:06:21.980 | To put it another way, if you can write an elegant algorithm,
00:06:26.860 | if you can write a legal brief that can change a case,
00:06:31.120 | if you can write a thousand words of prose that's going
00:06:33.360 | to fixate a reader right to the end.
00:06:35.260 | If you can look at a sea of ambiguous data and apply
00:06:39.540 | statistics and pull out insights
00:06:41.340 | that could transform a whole business strategy,
00:06:42.840 | if you can do these type of activities
00:06:44.460 | which require deep work that produce outcomes
00:06:47.260 | that are rare and valuable, people will find you.
00:06:50.440 | You will be able to write your own ticket, you will be able
00:06:53.140 | to build the foundation of a very meaningful
00:06:54.820 | and successful professional life regardless
00:06:57.220 | of how many Instagram followers you have.
00:06:59.660 | So this is the third common objection I hear
00:07:05.700 | when I suggest to people that they quit social media.
00:07:09.060 | In some sense I think it might be one of the most important.
00:07:11.040 | So this objection goes as follows.
00:07:12.880 | Cal, maybe I agree with you, maybe you're right,
00:07:15.520 | it's not a fundamental technology,
00:07:16.800 | maybe using social media is not at the core
00:07:19.980 | of my professional success, but you know what?
00:07:21.780 | It's harmless.
00:07:23.340 | I have some fun on it.
00:07:25.220 | Weird Twitter is funny.
00:07:26.440 | I don't even really use it that much.
00:07:28.300 | I'm a first adopter.
00:07:29.300 | It's just kind of interesting to try it out and maybe I might miss
00:07:32.180 | out on something if I don't use it.
00:07:33.140 | What's the harm?
00:07:33.940 | So again I look back and I say this objection also is nonsense.
00:07:39.860 | In this case what it misses is what I think is a very important
00:07:43.980 | reality that we need to talk about more frankly,
00:07:45.980 | which is that social media brings
00:07:48.420 | with it multiple well-documented significant harms.
00:07:52.420 | And we actually have to confront these harms head on when trying
00:07:57.200 | to make decisions about whether or not we embrace this
00:07:59.500 | technology and let it into our lives.
00:08:01.720 | So one of these harms that we know this technology brings has
00:08:06.400 | to do with your professional success.
00:08:08.100 | So I just argued before that the ability to focus intensely
00:08:13.460 | to produce things that are rare and valuable, to hone skills
00:08:15.860 | that the marketplace values, that this is what's going
00:08:17.580 | to matter in our economy.
00:08:18.580 | But right before that I argued
00:08:21.480 | that social media tools are designed to be addictive.
00:08:25.900 | The actual design desired use case of these tools is
00:08:29.040 | that you fragment your attention as much
00:08:30.640 | as possible throughout your waking hours.
00:08:32.100 | That's how these tools are designed to use.
00:08:33.440 | Well we have a growing amount of research which tells us
00:08:37.000 | that if you spend large portions of your day in a state
00:08:40.300 | of fragmented attention, so large portions of your day
00:08:43.500 | where you're constantly breaking up your attention,
00:08:44.920 | take a quick glance, do a just check, let me just quickly look
00:08:47.280 | at Instagram, that this can permanently reduce your capacity
00:08:50.880 | for concentration.
00:08:51.680 | In other words you could permanently reduce your capacity
00:08:55.380 | to do exactly the type of deep effort that we're finding
00:08:58.080 | to be more and more necessary
00:09:00.100 | in an increasingly competitive economy.
00:09:02.460 | So social media use is not harmless.
00:09:03.940 | It can actually have a significant negative impact
00:09:06.080 | on your ability to thrive in the economy.
00:09:08.460 | I am especially worried about this when we look
00:09:11.020 | at the younger generation coming up
00:09:12.540 | which is the most saturated in this technology.
00:09:14.200 | If you lose your ability to sustain concentration you're
00:09:18.140 | going to become less and less relevant to this economy.
00:09:21.060 | There's also psychological harms that are well documented
00:09:25.120 | in social media brings that we do need to address.
00:09:27.060 | So we know from the research literature
00:09:29.540 | that the more you use social media the more likely you are
00:09:32.340 | to feel lonely or isolated.
00:09:34.060 | We know that the constant exposure
00:09:37.820 | to your friends carefully curated positive portrayals
00:09:41.480 | of their life can leave you to feel inadequate
00:09:44.400 | and can increase rates of depression.
00:09:45.980 | And something I think we're going to be hearing more
00:09:49.040 | about in the near future is
00:09:51.020 | that there's a fundamental mismatch
00:09:53.360 | between the way our brains are wired and this behavior
00:09:57.040 | of exposing yourself to stimuli
00:09:58.700 | with intermittent rewards throughout all
00:10:00.180 | of your waking hours.
00:10:01.180 | So it's one thing to spend a couple hours
00:10:03.500 | at the slot machine in Las Vegas,
00:10:04.780 | but if you bring a slot machine with you and you pull
00:10:06.840 | that handle all day long from when you wake
00:10:08.520 | up to when you go to bed, we're not wired from it.
00:10:10.980 | It short circuits the brain and we're starting to find
00:10:13.220 | that it has actual cognitive consequences,
00:10:15.480 | one of them being the sort
00:10:16.480 | of pervasive background hum of anxiety.
00:10:18.460 | Now the canary in the coal mine
00:10:21.600 | for this issue is actually college campuses.
00:10:24.020 | If you talk to mental health experts
00:10:26.180 | on college campuses, they'll tell you along with the rise
00:10:29.860 | of ubiquitous smartphone use
00:10:31.240 | and social media use among the students on the campus came an
00:10:34.540 | explosion of anxiety related disorders on those campuses.
00:10:37.700 | So that's the canary in the coal mine.
00:10:39.480 | This type of behavior is a mismatch for our brain wire
00:10:42.640 | and it can make you feel miserable.
00:10:43.560 | So there's real cost to social media use,
00:10:47.500 | which means when you're trying to decide should I use this
00:10:50.300 | or not, saying it's harmless is not enough.
00:10:52.220 | You actually have to identify a significantly positive clear
00:10:56.740 | benefit that can outweigh these potential completely
00:10:59.300 | non-trivial harms.
00:11:00.140 | So people often ask, okay, but what is life
00:11:05.440 | like without social media?
00:11:06.880 | That can actually be a little bit scary to think about.
00:11:08.420 | What I found from people I know who have gone
00:11:11.100 | through this process, there can be a few weeks
00:11:12.780 | that are difficult.
00:11:13.400 | It actually is like a true detox process.
00:11:15.500 | The first two weeks can be uncomfortable.
00:11:18.360 | You feel a little bit anxious.
00:11:19.680 | You feel like you're missing a limb.
00:11:21.440 | But after that, things settle down and actually life
00:11:24.140 | after social media can be quite positive.
00:11:26.380 | There's two things I can report back to you from the world
00:11:29.880 | of no social media use.
00:11:31.060 | First, it can be quite productive.
00:11:33.500 | Be quite productive.
00:11:35.500 | So I'm a professor at a research institution.
00:11:38.720 | I've written five books.
00:11:39.460 | I rarely work past 5 p.m. on the weekday.
00:11:42.020 | Part of the way I'm able to pull that off is because it turns
00:11:46.780 | out if you treat your attention with respect,
00:11:50.680 | you don't fragment it.
00:11:51.760 | You allow it to stay whole.
00:11:53.120 | You preserve your ability to concentrate.
00:11:54.740 | When it comes time to work, you can actually do one thing
00:11:56.600 | after another and do it with intensity.
00:11:58.660 | And intensity can be traded for time.
00:12:00.760 | It's surprising how much you can get done in an eight-hour day
00:12:03.020 | if you're able to give each thing intense concentration
00:12:05.220 | after another.
00:12:05.840 | Something else I can report back from life
00:12:10.040 | without social media is that outside
00:12:12.040 | of work things can be quite peaceful.
00:12:13.940 | So I often joke I'd be very comfortable being a 1930s farmer
00:12:19.120 | because if you look at my leisure time,
00:12:20.440 | I read newspaper while the sun comes up.
00:12:22.800 | I listen to baseball on the radio.
00:12:24.400 | I honest to God sit in a leather chair and read hardcover books
00:12:27.620 | at night after my kids go to bed.
00:12:28.900 | It sounds old-fashioned, but I'll tell you,
00:12:31.580 | they were on to something back then.
00:12:32.920 | It's actually a restorative, very peaceful way
00:12:37.400 | to actually spend your time out of work.
00:12:38.780 | You don't have the constant hum of stimuli
00:12:40.640 | and the background hum of anxiety
00:12:43.040 | that comes along with that.
00:12:43.960 | So life without social media is really not so bad.
00:12:46.640 | So I pulled together these threads
00:12:49.320 | and you see my full argument for why I think not everyone,
00:12:51.560 | but certainly much more people than right now use social media.
00:12:55.000 | Much more people should not be using social media.
00:12:56.960 | And that's because we can first, to summarize,
00:12:59.240 | discard with the main concerns
00:13:01.140 | that somehow it's a fundamental technology you have to use.
00:13:03.300 | Nonsense.
00:13:03.860 | It's a slot machine in your phone.
00:13:05.340 | We can discard with this notion that you're not going
00:13:07.440 | to get a job if you don't use social media.
00:13:08.860 | Nonsense.
00:13:09.800 | Anything a 16-year-old with a smartphone can do is not going
00:13:12.040 | to be what the market rewards.
00:13:13.840 | And then I emphasized the point that there's real harms with it.
00:13:17.080 | So it's not just harmless.
00:13:18.040 | You really would have to have a significant benefit before you
00:13:21.220 | would actually say this tradeoff is worth it.
00:13:22.560 | And finally I noted that life
00:13:24.680 | without social media there's real positives associated
00:13:27.340 | with it.
00:13:27.600 | So I'm hoping that when many of you actually go
00:13:31.360 | through this same calculus,
00:13:32.440 | you'll at least consider the perspective I'm making right
00:13:35.160 | now, which is many more people would be much better off
00:13:37.840 | if they didn't use this technology.
00:13:39.580 | Now of course some of you might disagree.
00:13:42.140 | Some of you might have scathing but accurate critiques of me
00:13:46.900 | and my points.
00:13:47.440 | And of course I welcome all negative feedback.
00:13:49.780 | I just ask that you direct your comments towards Twitter.
00:13:52.680 | Thank you.
00:13:53.840 | [ Applause ]
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