The HBS hosts talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of social media.

Social media dominate much of our current lives. Sometimes this is for the better, sometimes this is for the worse. Social media platforms allow much that is beneficial to individuals, communities, and society. Yet they also allow much that is detrimental or even damaging. What is good about social media? What is bad? And what is downright ugly? We talk about who is helped by social media and who is hurt by it. We talk about its effects on our society. And we talk about why we use or don’t use social media.

In this episode, the following authors, texts, creations, and ideas are discussed:

• The TV show South Side
• Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
• Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants
• Our episode “Conspiracy Theories“
• Our episode “Private Cities“
• Cathy O’Neil Weapons of Math Destruction and her company, O’Neil Risk Consulting & Algorithmic Auditing (ORCAA)
• Human “content moderators” at Facebook
• The film A Clockwork Orange
• Zeeshan Aleem’s Twitter thread on disinterpretation
• Christopher Long on affordances and denials of social media
• Plato, The Phaedrus
• Birds aren’t real
• The U.S. soap opera All My Children