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sara_hilliger 's review for:
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
by Jaron Lanier
Putting this at the top so some people may see it - does anyone have recommendations for books on this topic that are thought-provoking AND well organized?
I think that if this book went through about three more rounds of editing, it could be decent. There are interesting ideas, and I was so hopeful that it would be good, but WOW is it badly organized, and extremely convoluted.
It's divided into so many sections, doesn't really have transitions, and jumps around wildly between super broad concepts like religion/spirituality and free will, and very concrete examples. There are way too many analogies, and about half of them make sense.
One of the biggest issues for me is the citations - he just puts the URL in a footnote, which isn't enough info for a reader to know if it's credible. He also throws out a lot of citations, but there are many ideas that he should need evidence for that aren't cited. It feels like a false credibility. How did that get past an editor?
Also, throughout almost the whole book he uses this BUMMER acronym that is supposed to represent what the manipulative parts of social media have become, but it's meaningless because he does a terrible job of explaining it. There is BUMMER in all caps multiple times a page, and after reading the whole book I'm still not quite sure what he wants me to think that means. You would think it stands for words/phrases that start with B-U-M-M-E-R, but it doesn't - he lays out the ideas of BUMMER using phrases that contain (not even start with) A-B-C-D-E-F. So...what was the point of BUMMER other than to make it clear that it's a negative phenomenon? I read the whole book and I'm still not sure.
I wanted this to be good, but it just wasn't. I'll have to look for other books about social media and its impact on individuals, because I was really excited to read about this topic!
I think that if this book went through about three more rounds of editing, it could be decent. There are interesting ideas, and I was so hopeful that it would be good, but WOW is it badly organized, and extremely convoluted.
It's divided into so many sections, doesn't really have transitions, and jumps around wildly between super broad concepts like religion/spirituality and free will, and very concrete examples. There are way too many analogies, and about half of them make sense.
One of the biggest issues for me is the citations - he just puts the URL in a footnote, which isn't enough info for a reader to know if it's credible. He also throws out a lot of citations, but there are many ideas that he should need evidence for that aren't cited. It feels like a false credibility. How did that get past an editor?
Also, throughout almost the whole book he uses this BUMMER acronym that is supposed to represent what the manipulative parts of social media have become, but it's meaningless because he does a terrible job of explaining it. There is BUMMER in all caps multiple times a page, and after reading the whole book I'm still not quite sure what he wants me to think that means. You would think it stands for words/phrases that start with B-U-M-M-E-R, but it doesn't - he lays out the ideas of BUMMER using phrases that contain (not even start with) A-B-C-D-E-F. So...what was the point of BUMMER other than to make it clear that it's a negative phenomenon? I read the whole book and I'm still not sure.
I wanted this to be good, but it just wasn't. I'll have to look for other books about social media and its impact on individuals, because I was really excited to read about this topic!