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burcak bayram's avatar

Been a while since I deleted ig and found myself on substack. This was a great read, thank you!

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Sarp Gürakan's avatar

Thank you! I have unfortunately come back to Instagram... Self discipline alone is not enough in such an asymmetric playing field.

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Jasiel's avatar

It's funny, i purposely opened substack this morning instead of IG to keep from scrolling. Congrats on deleting ✨

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Sarp Gürakan's avatar

There you go! Maybe Substack is the way out of IG! Thank you, it's actually pretty difficult 🤦

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kayla uleah evans's avatar

This was great, Sarp. Thank you. And the last line... oof.

I have hope; we've updated our mental model around agency before. America once had a universal assumption of free will / agency over one's eating decisions and this was exploited for selling diet programs and even entertaining audiences (e.g. The Biggest Loser which turned this exercise of free will into a competition; it feels like a fever dream that this show existed (for 17 seasons!?!)). I hope, in a similar way, we mature out of the idea that we all have free will /agency over our social media use.

On a separate note, I wanted to share the below quote by Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing). I have it pinned to the top of my IG to remind me that every scroll is a high-stakes decision, even if the platform makes it feel trivial.

"We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like "annoying" or "distracting." But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to "want what we want to want." Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self."

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Sarp Gürakan's avatar

Thank you Kayla! Funny enough, this is not the first time I'm talking about the Biggest Loser and reality TV as it relates to social media! The Odell quote is fantastic, thank you for sharing. The "drops" in the bucket can easily fill the bucket if they're frequent enough...

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