Review of Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts . . . | Gond & Chandravanshi

[fond noir][blanc]BOOK REVIEW[/blanc][/fond noir]

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Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
by Jaron Lanier

Henry Holt and Company
2018, 160 pages, ?3,230

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Reviewed by Arun Kumar Gond, Ranjan Kumar Chandravanshi

This book highlights the importance of avoiding social media. Author Jaron Lanier, a tech expert, critiques big tech and their exploitative practices. He explains how social media harms freedom, real-life interactions, and productivity while misusing user data for profit. More than a warning; it urges readers to rethink their digital habits and embrace real-life experiences.

In this book, Jaron Lanier presents ten strong reasons/argument to quit social-media. He believes that social-media negatively impacts our lives and that we should break free from it. To explain this, he uses an interesting example of dogs and cats. Dogs are obedient and follow commands, while cats are independent and live on their own terms. Lanier compares social-media users to dogs; as these platforms are designed to keep us hooked. Likes and comments make us return repeatedly, shaping our habits and decisions. The author argues that, instead of being like dogs, we should learn from cats; living freely and making our own choices. Social-media controls our time and attention, reducing our independence. By quitting it, we can regain control over our lives and live more freely.

The first chapter, You Are Losing Your Free Will, explains how modern technology silently controls our decisions. Social-media, smartphones, and smart devices constantly track our data, monitor our habits, and influence our choices without us realizing it. Every search, video watched, or conversation online is recorded and used by big companies to manipulate us.
Over time, we become trapped in a digital system that shapes our thoughts and behaviours. For example, if you casually search for a vacation destination, you will soon start seeing travel ads, hotel deals, and flight discounts everywhere. This is not a coincidence- these platforms collect your interests and use them to push content that influences your decisions. The book warns that as social-media increasingly controls what we see and think; our personal freedom is slowly disappearing.

The second chapter, Quitting Social-media Is the Best Way to Resist the Madness of Our Times, explains how social-media platforms are designed to manipulate user behaviour for profit. These platforms encourage division, spread misinformation, and promote emotionally charged content to keep users engaged. The author introduces the concept of the BUMMER era (Behaviours of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent); where big companies track user habits and modify their experiences to maximize engagement. This leads to a world where false information spreads faster than the truth, and people become increasingly polarized.

The third chapter, Social-media Is Making You an Asshole, explains how spending too much time on social-media negatively changes people