I gave a talk at a small conference in northern Virginia in 2016. I began by admitting that I'd never had a social-media account; I then outlined arguments for why other people should consider removing social media from their lives. The event organizers uploaded my talk to YouTube. Then it was shared repeatedly on Facebook and Instagram and, eventually, viewed more than five million times. I was both pleased and annoyed by the fact that my anti-social-media talk had found such a large audience on social media.
This event is typical of the love-hate relationships many of us have with Facebook, Instagram, and other social-media platforms. On the one hand, we've become cautious about attention economy, which destroys social life gradually and offends privacy in the name of corporate (公司的) profits. But we also benefit from social media and hesitate to break away from it completely. Not long ago, I met a partner at a large law firm in Washington, D.C., who told me that she keeps Instagram on her phone because she misses her kids when she travels; looking through pictures of them makes her feel better.
Recently, some biggest social-media companies, Facebook and Twitter, in particular, have promised various reforms. Mark Zuckerberg announced a plan to move his platform toward private communication protected by end-to-end encryption (端对端加密); later he suggested establishing a third-party group to set standards for acceptable content.
A group of developers called the Indie Web are not satisfied with the reforms of social-media companies and are developing their own social-media platforms, which they say will preserve what's good while getting rid of what's bad. They hope to rebuild social media according to principles that are less corporate and more humane (人道的).
