Why Don't You Use Social Media?
Chapters
0:0 Cal's intro0:13 Cal reads a question about social media
0:20 Cal goes back in history
0:57 Cal's initial feelings with Facebook
1:49 Cal's second reason for not joining social media
2:30 Cal's observations
00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC]
00:00:04.740 | All right, we're making good progress here.
00:00:05.940 | Uh, we've got a quick one here.
00:00:06.940 | This one comes from Ryan.
00:00:08.220 | Ryan asks, Cal, how did you never get tempted to join any social media platform?
00:00:14.000 | You know, I get asked that a lot.
00:00:16.520 | I don't completely remember is the honest answer.
00:00:20.780 | What I can piece together is 2004.
00:00:26.520 | I was a senior at Dartmouth.
00:00:29.280 | Facebook at the time was marching from campus to campus, right?
00:00:33.680 | They had a strategy back then of opening it up to specific universities at a time.
00:00:38.120 | And it arrived at Dartmouth in 2004.
00:00:40.360 | I went back and confirmed this, uh, with various people who were there.
00:00:44.200 | I do remember there was a lot of excitement around it.
00:00:47.000 | It might've even been called the Facebook back then.
00:00:50.240 | And my vague memory is the two things that turned me off about it was number one,
00:00:56.120 | back then your Facebook profile was all about favorite list,
00:01:00.920 | favorite books, favorite songs.
00:01:03.080 | Like you had to basically carefully curate these lists of things that
00:01:07.280 | your favorites, and it didn't matter if they were favorites or not.
00:01:09.520 | This was all about Irving Goffman's presentation of self to others.
00:01:13.160 | You were trying to very carefully craft your public persona by selecting,
00:01:17.080 | you know, a quirky mix of a little bit indie, but then you throw in like a
00:01:21.360 | big genre book, the show that you're of the people, but then you put in a
00:01:25.520 | portrait of the artist as a young man, the show you're sophisticated.
00:01:27.680 | It was, it just seemed very artificial.
00:01:29.560 | And I hate doing lists.
00:01:30.960 | Everyone who knows me knows this.
00:01:32.200 | If you say, what's your favorite book, what's your favorite movie?
00:01:34.040 | I can't do it.
00:01:34.640 | I literally can't do it.
00:01:35.720 | I don't know why.
00:01:36.520 | Uh, the ordering function of my brain is broken.
00:01:39.920 | So I, I didn't, I really didn't like this idea of having to come up with these lists.
00:01:43.840 | It felt artificial and I'm really bad at it.
00:01:45.480 | It really does make me feel upset.
00:01:47.040 | So I was like, yeah, I'm not going to join.
00:01:48.040 | The second reason I vaguely remember, this is such a long time ago, but I'm
00:01:52.400 | a contemporary of Zuckerberg, we're both computer science students, both
00:01:56.000 | at Ivy, Ivy league universities.
00:01:57.960 | I had had a.com startup that I closed down a couple of years
00:02:02.400 | before Facebook got started.
00:02:03.880 | And so there was probably some inter Ivy jealousy there.
00:02:07.480 | Like, okay, why is this fellow nerd?
00:02:10.800 | Who's very similar to me.
00:02:12.720 | You know, why is everyone excited about his company?
00:02:15.520 | And so there's probably a little bit of jealousy of like, I don't
00:02:17.600 | want to pump up this guy's ego.
00:02:19.760 | And you know, that worked and that worked.
00:02:21.840 | And no one ever thought about him again.
00:02:23.480 | But no, so I don't know.
00:02:25.200 | Those are the two things I remember.
00:02:26.400 | And then once I had some separation from social media, I begin to observe.
00:02:31.160 | Wait a second.
00:02:32.440 | People have kind of a weird relationship to this.
00:02:34.280 | So I had that Margaret Mead anthropological separation from
00:02:39.080 | what was going on around me.
00:02:40.400 | And I was like, this seems a little bit weird.
00:02:42.160 | The more I watched this from the outside, the more it seems like I'm looking
00:02:45.520 | at a weird tribal ritual here.
00:02:47.440 | And I got more and more turned off about it.
00:02:50.240 | Like, I really don't know about this.
00:02:51.720 | And over time, my distaste for it kind of grew.
00:02:53.800 | The skepticism grew.
00:02:54.920 | And then, and again, I always say this.
00:02:56.880 | I got very public about my skepticism about it.
00:02:59.360 | And everyone said I was crazy until about 2016.
00:03:03.360 | And then suddenly everyone was on board.
00:03:05.520 | So that was, it's, that was a weird experience in itself, but
00:03:08.560 | that's my vague memory, Ryan.
00:03:09.800 | I don't know.
00:03:10.160 | There might've been other factors involved.
00:03:11.720 | Uh, but that's it.
00:03:13.240 | That's what I remember.
00:03:14.360 | [MUSIC]