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Alright, so, you probably don't realize
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that right now, you're actually looking at something quite rare.
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Because I am a millennial computer scientist book author
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standing on a TEDx stage,
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and yet, I've never had a social media account.
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How this happened was actually somewhat random.
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Social media first came onto my radar when I was at college,
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my sophomore year of college,
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just as when Facebook arrived at our campus.
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And at the time, which was right after the first dotcom bust,
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I had had a dorm room business, I'd had to shut it down in the bust,
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and then, suddenly, this other kid from Harvard, named Mark,
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had this product called Facebook and people being excited about it.
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So in sort of a fit of somewhat immature professional jealousy,
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I said, "I'm not going to use this thing.
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I'm not gonna help this kid's business; whatever it's going to amount to."
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Soon as I go along my life, I look up not long later,
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and I see everyone I know is really hooked on this thing.
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And from the clarity you can get
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when you have some objectivity, some perspective on it,
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I realized this seems a little bit dangerous.
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So I never signed up.
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I've never had a social media account since.
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So I'm here for two reasons; I want to deliver two messages.
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The first message I want to deliver
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is that even though I've never had a social media account,
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I'm OK, you don't have to worry.
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It turns out I still have friends,
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I still know what's going on in the world;
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as a computer scientist
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I still collaborate with people all around the world,
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I'm still regularly exposed serendipitously to interesting ideas,
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and I rarely describe myself as lacking entertainment options.
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So I've been OK, but I'd go even farther and say
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not only I am OK without social media but I think I'm actually better off.
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I think I'm happier, I think I find more sustainability in my life,
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and I think I've been more successful professionally
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because I don't use social media.
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So my second goal here on stage
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is try to convince more of you to believe the same thing.
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Let's see if I could actually convince more of you
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that you too would be better off if you quit social media.
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So, if the theme of this TEDx event is "Future Trends,"
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I guess, in other words, this would be my vision of the future;
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it would be one in which fewer people actually use social media.
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That's a big claim, I think I need to back it up.
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So I thought, what I would do
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is take the three most common objections I hear
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when I suggest to people that they quit social media,
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and then for each of these objections, I'll try to defuse the hype
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and see if I can actually push in some more reality.
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This is the first most common objection I hear.
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That's not a hermit,
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that's actually a hipster web developer down from 8th Street. I'm not sure.
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Hipster or hermit? Sometimes it's hard to tell.
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This first objection goes as follows,
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"Cal, social media is one of the fundamental technologies
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of the 21st century.
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To reject social media would be an act of extreme Luddism.
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It would be like riding to work on a horse or using a rotary phone.
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I can't take such a big stance in my life."
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My reaction to that objection is I think that it's nonsense.
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Social media is not a fundamental technology.
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It leverages some fundamental technologies,
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but it's better understood as this:
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Which is to say, it's a source of entertainment,
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it's an entertainment product.
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The way that technologist Jaron Lanier puts it
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is that these companies offer you shiny treats
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in exchange for minutes of your attention and bites of your personal data,
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which can then be packaged up and sold.
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So to say that you don't use social media should not be a large social stance,
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it's just rejecting one form of entertainment for others.
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There should be no more controversial than saying,
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"I don't like newspapers, I like to get my news from magazines,"
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or "I prefer to watch cable series, as I opposed to network television series."
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It's not a major political or social stance
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to say you don't use this product.
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My use of the slot machine image up here also is not accidental
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because if you look a little bit closer at these technologies,
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it's not just that they're a source of entertainment
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but they're a somewhat unsavory source of entertainment.
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We now know that many of the major social media companies
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hire individuals called "attention engineers"
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who borrow principles from Las Vegas casino gambling,
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among other places,
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to try to make these products as addictive as possible.
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That is the desired use case of these products:
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It's that you use it in an addictive fashion because that maximizes the profit
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that can be extracted from your attention and data.
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So it's not a fundamental technology,
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it's just a source of entertainment, one among many,
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and it's somewhat unsavory if you look a little bit closer.
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Here's the second common objection I hear
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when I suggest that people quit social media.
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The objection goes as follows,
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"Cal, I can't quit social media
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because it is vital to my success in the 21st century economy.
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If I do not have a well-cultivated social media brand,
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people won't know who I am, people won't be able to find me,
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opportunities won't come my way,
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and I will effectively disappear from the economy."
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Again my reaction is once again:
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This objection also is nonsense.
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I recently published this book
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that draws on multiple different strands of evidence
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to make the point that, in a competitive 21st century economy,
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what the market values
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is the ability to produce things that are rare and are valuable.
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If you produce something that's rare and valuable,
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the market will value that.
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What the market dismisses, for the most part,
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are activities that are easy to replicate and produce a small amount of value.
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Well, social media use is the epitome
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of an easy to replicate activity that doesn't produce a lot of value;
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it's something that any six-year-old with a smartphone can do.
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By definition,
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the market is not going to give a lot of value to those behaviors.
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It's instead going to reward the deep, concentrated work required
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to build real skills and to apply those skills to produce things
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- like a craftsman -
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that are rare and that are valuable.
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To put it another way: if you can write an elegant algorithm,
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if you can write a legal brief that can change a case,
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if you can write a thousand words of prose
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that's going to fixate a reader right to the end;
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if you can look at a sea of ambiguous data
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and apply statistics, and pull out insights
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that could transform a business strategy,
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if you can do these type of activities which require deep work,
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that produce outcomes that are rare and valuable,
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people will find you.
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You will be able to write your own ticket.
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You will be able to build the foundation of a meaningful and successful professional life,
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regardless of how many Instagram followers you have.
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This is the third comment objection I hear
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when I suggest to people that they quit social media;
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in some sense, I think it might be one of the most important.
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This objection goes as follows,
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"Cal, maybe I agree, maybe you're right; it's not a fundamental technology.
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Maybe using social media is not at the core of my professional success.
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But, you know what?
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It's harmless, I have some fun on it - weird: Twitter's funny -
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I don't even use it that much, I'm a first adopter,
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it's kind of interesting to try it out,
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and maybe I might miss out something if I don't use it.
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What's the harm?"
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Again, I look back and I say: this objection also is nonsense.
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In this case, what it misses is what I think is a very important reality
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that we need to talk about more frankly,
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which is that social media brings with it
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multiple, well-documented, and significant harms.
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We actually have to confront these harms head-on
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when trying to make decisions
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about whether or not we embrace this technology
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and let it into our lives.
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One of these harms that we know this technology brings
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has to do with your professional success.
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I just argued before that the ability to focus intensely,
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to produce things that are rare and valuable,
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to hone skills the market place value on,
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that this is what will matter in our economy.
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But right before that,
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I argued that social media tools are designed to be addictive.
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The actual designed desired-use case of these tools
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is that you fragment your attention as much as possible
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throughout your waking hours;
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that's how these tools are designed to use.
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We have a growing amount of research which tells us
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that if you spend large portions of your day
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in a state of fragmented attention -
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so large portions of your day, it will constantly break up your attention
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to take a quick glance, to just check, - "I'm just quickly looking at Instagram" -
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that this can permanently reduce your capacity for concentration.
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In other words, you could permanently reduce your capacity
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to do exactly the type of deep effort
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that we're finding to be more and more necessary
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in an increasingly competitive economy.
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So social media use is not harmless,
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it can actually have a significant negative impact
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on your ability to thrive in the economy.
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I'm especially worried about this when we look at the younger generation coming up,
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which is the most saturated in this technology.
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If you lose your ability to sustain concentration,
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you're going to become less and less relevant to this economy.
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There's also psychological harms that are well documented
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that social media brings, that we do need to address.
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We know from the research literature that the more you use social media,
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the more likely you are to feel lonely or isolated.
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We know that the constant exposure
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to your friends carefully curated, positive portrayals of their life
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can leave you to feel inadequate, and can increase rates of depression.
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And something I think we're going to be hearing more about in the near future
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is that there's a fundamental mismatch
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between the way our brains are wired
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and this behavior of exposing yourself to stimuli
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with intermittent rewards throughout all of your waking hours.
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It's one thing to spend a couple of hours at a slot machine in Las Vegas,
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but if you bring one with you, and you pull that handle all day long,
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from when you wake up to when you go to bed: we're not wired from it.
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It short-circuits the brain,
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and we're starting to find it has actual cognitive consequences,
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one of them being this sort of pervasive background hum of anxiety.
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The canary in the coal mine for this issue is actually college campuses.
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If you talk to mental health experts on college campuses, they'll tell you
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that along with the rise of ubiquitous smartphone use
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and social media use among the students on the campus,
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came an explosion of anxiety-related disorders on those campuses.
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That's the canary in the coal mine.
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This type of behavior is a mismatch for our brain wiring
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and can make you feel miserable.
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So there's real cost to social media use;
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which means when you're trying to decide, "Should I use this or not?",
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saying it's harmless is not enough.
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You actually have to identify a significantly positive, clear benefit
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that can outweigh these potential, completely non-trivial harms.
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People often ask,
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"OK, but what is life like without social media?"
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That can actually be a little bit scary to think about.
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What I've found from people I know who've gone through this process,
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there can be a few weeks that are difficult
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that actually is like a true detox process.
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The first two weeks can be uncomfortable:
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you feel a little bit anxious, you feel like you're missing a limb.
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But after that, things settle down,
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and actually, life after social media can be quite positive.
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There's two things I can report back from the world of no social media use.
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First, it can be quite productive.
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I'm a professor at a research institution, I've written five books,
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I rarely work past 5 pm on a weekday.
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Part of the way I'm trying to able to pull that off
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is because it turns out, if you treat your attention with respect,
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- so you don't fragment it; you allow it to stay whole,
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you preserve your ability to concentrate -
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when it comes the time to work
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you can actually do one thing after another, and do it with intensity,
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and intensity can be traded for time.
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It's surprising how much you can get done in eight-hour day
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if you're able to give each thing intense concentration after another.
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Something else I can report back from life without social media
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is that, outside of work, things can be quite peaceful.
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I often joke I'd be very comfortable being a 1930s farmer,
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because if you look at my leisure time,
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I read the newspaper while the sun comes up;
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I listen to baseball on the radio;
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I honest-to-god sit in a leather chair
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and read hardcover books at night after my kids go to bed.
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It sounds old-fashioned, but I'll tell you they are onto something back then.
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It's actually a restorative, a very peaceful way to actually spend your time out of work.
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You don't have the constant hum of stimuli,
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and the background hum of anxiety that comes along with that.
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So life without social media is really not so bad.
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If you pull together these threads, you see my full argument for I think
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that not everyone, but certainly much more people than right now use social media,
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much more people should not be using social media.
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That's because we can first, to summarize,
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discard with the main concerns
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that it's a fundamental technology you have to use.
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Nonsense: it's a slot machine in your phone.
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We can discard with this notion that you're not gonna get a job if you don't use social media.
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Nonsense: anything a six-year-old with a smartphone can do
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is not going to be what the market rewards.
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And then I emphasized the point that there's real harms with it.
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So it's not just harmless.
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You really would have to have a significant benefit
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before you would say this trade-off is worth it.
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Finally I noted, that life without social media:
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there's real positives associated with it.
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So I'm hoping that when many of you actually go through this same calculus,
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you'll at least consider the perspective I'm making right now,
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which is: many more people would be much better off
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if they didn't use this technology.
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Now, of course some of you might disagree,
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some of you might have scathing but accurate critiques
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of me and my points,
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and of course, I welcome all negative feedback.
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I just ask that you direct your comments towards Twitter.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
