- All right, next question's from Bo, a 38 year old teacher. I'm not big on social media, but as an independent researcher in the humanities, I use academia.edu and ResearchGate mainly to get access to papers. I also have a Twitter and a LinkedIn account mainly to share my blog posts and see if I can find an audience.

Is this the right balance? - Right, there's a good case study of our discussion from the deep dive earlier in the show. So not knowing too much about specifically what type of research you do or your career, let's just give some random recommendations here. Paying for access to academic articles is a no brainer if you are an academic who's not associated with an institution that gives you that access, so of course.

Twitter, I don't think you need to be there. We just talked about this. Twitter gives you this illusion that it's gonna grant you a virality that will grow your audience bigger than if you hadn't had Twitter. I would say, forget it, just produce really good work. Twitter may work on your behalf.

People may share your work on there and you need to have a platform you own to capture that attention, but putting your attention in the content production on Twitter is going to open you up to all these negatives and dilute the positives you get from your own platform. LinkedIn, I guess it just depends what you're doing on it.

So for LinkedIn to be effective, A, you have to ignore the sort of increasing social features slash streaming distraction features and just focus on the core original ability to use it to look at tertiary network connections. I mean, the value of LinkedIn, the unique value proposition of LinkedIn is I can look at people who are in the network of people I know.

So not secondary, but tertiary connections. That's really useful, right? So you say, okay, I need a connection to the movie industry. I don't know anyone in the movie industry, but I probably know someone who knows someone in the movie industry. That person can make a recommendation on my behalf.

And so it opens up contacts. And because you have an intermediary who knows both ends of this link, that's actually a high quality contact. If you go out one more layer, it doesn't work anymore. So if it's, I know someone who knows someone who knows someone in the movie industry, that connection doesn't work because there's no person in common between you and the ultimate person you wanna talk to.

So I remember my longtime friend, Ben Kastnoka, who used to be Reed Hoffman's chief of staff. I remember him at the time when LinkedIn was really taking off, explaining this network theory to me. It's all about the sweet spot of your friends' friends is the sweet spot of opening yourself up to a huge amount of potential connections while still having the ability to make those connections strong.

So if your work is such that as an independent researcher, you need contracts or engagements with clients in various type of industries, and you need connections to people in those industries, that aspect of LinkedIn could be very valuable. So I would summarize this, I guess, as saying, yes, to paying money to gain access to articles, no to Twitter, maybe yes to LinkedIn if you really need it.

Now, there's a bigger point here that I made in a New York Times op-ed that came out in 2016, and it actually generated a lot of furor at the time. But I wrote this New York Times op-ed where I said, "We overestimate the value of social media presence "in getting noticed and succeeding in your career." And I say, "We are forgetting the fact "that these platforms are very new, "and most industries have been around for a very long time.

"Twitter was not used at a high rate until 2012 or 2014." So when I was writing that op-ed, this is a few years ago. Before that, all these industries still existed. People still got noticed, got hired, grew reputations, grew really big careers, and they did this all without Twitter followers.

And they did this all without being an influencer on Instagram. So presumably, these bespoke methods by which your work is noticed and rewarded still exist in most fields that have been around for more than just a handful of years. So don't ignore those. In fact, if you ignore those and say, "I'm gonna invent my own way to get noticed "and succeed in my field based on social media," you're taking a huge risk.

You need to pay less attention to your Twitter followers and say, "In my particular field, "I'm this independent researcher in humanities "who makes my money this way, "how do people traditionally get noticed and succeed?" Almost all of those channels are still there. Social media's rise, which is only still just a decade old at this point of any sort of widespread adoption, has not gotten rid of existing channels of getting noticed and succeeding.

And so I keep coming back to that with people. How do people traditionally get noticed and succeed in your field? And usually it involves producing really good stuff, and it's really hard. It has nothing to do with virality or having large follower counts. And it's almost always that's gonna be the answer.

And so until you have a really good answer to that question, forget about new tools are gonna somehow give you a shortcut. Now, when I wrote that op-ed in 2016, that caused a lot of problems. This was right before the mainstream had turned against social media. So the political right in America had turned against social media at this point because they were worried about being censored.

But the political center and left in America was still very laudatory towards social media at this point when that came out. And so me standing up and saying, "Social media is not as important "as you think for your career. "You should maybe ignore that "and focus on the fundamentals." It was considered a heretical, almost certifiable thing to say.

It really upset people. It was, "Whoa, no, no, no. "Social media is the key. "It's how you get noticed. "It's how you circumvent all of these gatekeepers. "It's how you build up movements." I mean, there was so much pushback, really surprised me. And I've talked about this on the show before, but the New York Times commissioned the next week a response op-ed.

They got the social media manager of monster.com, Patrick someone, Patrick Gilroy, to write a response op-ed to mine and say, "This is crazy, don't listen to this. "A lot of articles were written in response to mine. "This is crazy, don't listen to this. "I had hostile radio interviews." We're like, "How can you believe this?" Now I understand this mechanism because we see it all the time in 2022, 2023.

We see this all the time. Where is the fiercest pushback generated? This sort of, when you get these type of big pylons generated. It's not when someone comes from left field from the completely other team and throw some rocks. You're used to that. It's when someone who you feel like is in or close to your tribe pushes a little bit to the edge.

Then it seemed a little bit more like heresy and that has to be policed. So if, you know, in 2016, Jaron Lanier stands up and says, "Social media is nonsense." People like, "Yeah, that's Jaron Lanier. "I mean, he's like kind of crazy and brilliant. "And this is what he's been saying for a long time.

"And we know it, it's not a big deal." But if a computer scientist comes out and says that, someone who is in sort of mainstream thought, someone who has some influence with an audience, someone who's sort of a part of that sort of mainstream centrist or leftist inner tribe comes out and says, "I don't think that's that important." You have to fiercely, at the time, you had to fiercely police that to prevent the Overton window from shifting away from the direction you wanted to shift.

So it was an interesting example of what became much more prevalent in the years that followed. The sort of policing of views. And this became increasingly political after a while. So the left and the right would do this on political hot topics, but this was less political, but it was just more, there's this mainstream intellectual thought that social media was this powerful force that toppled dictators and helped Barack Obama get elected.

And it was very meaningful, important. And so if you're involved in this sort of mainstream intellectual life, they did not like someone starting to veer off the reservation. Now everyone's like, "Of course." Yeah, everyone agrees with it now, but it was interesting. So it was like an early mild pile on, but it showed a general internet dynamic that I think has really strengthened ever since then.

- So you wrote that before the Like button got introduced, right? - Like, no, the Like button actually got introduced earlier. - Oh, okay. - Yeah, so the Like button got introduced like 2007 or eight or something like that. - Oh, right, right, right. - Yeah. Yeah, the interesting thing was when I wrote that, it was right, so the turning point in the mainstream intellectual thought on social media was Donald Trump getting elected.

And that's ultimately what turned it is the shift from Facebook helping Barack Obama to Facebook helping Trump shifted, I think, the reception of social media. And it opened up like a lot more skepticism and hostility towards the platform from the center and left. The hostility from the right was already there.

I started hearing that like 2015. So that was already there. But from the center and the left, that was after the Trump election. But it wasn't immediate because that op-ed, that op-ed came out in the Sunday in the New York Times in the Week in Review, the Sunday after Donald Trump was elected.

So it wasn't an immediate response. I mean, it was a Week in Review section that was that and like a bunch of political stuff. And then the next week they had the follow-up, right? So in the first, the last months of 2016, early months of 2017, there still was a general positive consensus on social media.

It wasn't really till the Cambridge Analytica and the Russian disinformation stories. When those really took off, which was more after Trump was in office in 2017, that's when you began to see the shift. So I know it's an interesting time point. So really the shift towards universal negativity towards social media was probably first or second quarter of 2017.

If not all the way around, you had to get all the way to like 2018 really before people were on board. But then by the time I was promoting digital minimalism in 2019, the pushback I was getting from reporters is like, why aren't you pushing for even harder, regulations and shutting down these companies?

So I mean, man, that thing flipped. That thing flipped hard.