I’ve been complaining about social media forever by this point, and so has everyone else. But a recent effort to actively rebuild my social life has revealed something about how these two things relate. Social media isn’t a cheap and inadequate facsimile of social life; it’s its exact opposite. It isn’t worse than social life at fostering personal connection, it undoes personal connection and reverses our social skills.

~ David Cain, from Social Media is the Opposite of Social Life

The difficulty in getting one’s social life back arises from exactly what make the social media so successful (for the corporate overlordes squeezing value form all of us people): Everyone is there, now. Actual social life didn’t used to be the default thing—it used to be the only thing. Forevermore there will now be the need to choose. What matters in the end—obviously—is the choices each of us makes.

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