They isolate us from deeper, competing relationships in favour of superficial contact – ‘user engagement’ – that keeps their hold on us strong. Working with social media, they insidiously curate our social lives, manipulating us emotionally with dark patterns to keep us scrolling.
This does seem to be more of a problem with social media, rather than a phone per-se.
My phone isn’t taking over my life, even though it’s turned on a lot of the time, because I don’t really have any kind of social media on it. So pretty much the only times my phone goes ‘ding’ is when someone I know wants to contact me, and I can reply at my leisure.
It’s a tool, and you get to decide what you use it for, and it’s not like “don’t use facebook” is a tricky technical hurdle to pass.
