Rather than disconnect, I’m choosing gratitude.
Over the past 2–3 months, I have been deleting social media apps from my phone. I admit that I did watch the @Netflix special The Social Dilemma, and it reinforced the hours of Jaron Lanier videos I have viewed over the past few years.
He had me swayed quite a while back, but I never took the time to think about the impact, and I hadn’t really done any true experimentation with deleting social media apps. I deleted @Facebook post-2016 US elections and FB Messenger several months later after being freaked out. When I said a friend's name one evening, it must have been listening to me since the same evening I got two emails from Facebook directing me to new posts he had written over the previous month. I hadn’t used Facebook for at least a year at that point, so I figured it had to be stalking me. A year later, I had a similar experience with my @Amazon Siri, or is it, Alexa? Either way, I unplugged it, and when I moved to Switzerland, included the small speakers with a piece of furniture I sold.
(I disabled the Apple voice application on my iPhone btw, too.)
My niece, who lived with me, had the Amazon voice device, as well. I think she was 16 when I gave it to her (she’s almost 21 now). I had ulterior motives because I could control it and turn on alarms, blaring music when she was oversleeping on school days.
