waking up unexpectedly dizzy and spending the entire day in bed with eyes closed listening to the radio is not how I planned to spend the day. This never happened before. But doing nothing all day might have been something I needed.

A former Facebook VP says social media is destroying society. And he’s right.

futurismnews:

Speaking at a recent event at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Chamath Palihapitiya – a former vice president for user growth at Facebook – expressed a concern that social media platforms have become “tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

Palihapitiya brought up the example of a WhatsApp hoax campaign in India that led to a string of lynchings. However, new technology is also having more subtle effects on the way that we interact with one another.

“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” said Palihapitiya, according to a report from The Verge. Interactions such as ‘liking’ a photograph or ‘favoriting’ a tweet are perhaps more about short-term gratification than the basis for meaningful communication and relationships, Palihapitiya suggested. Read more here. 

A former Facebook VP says social media is destroying society. And he’s right.

The dream I was woken up from involved skating from Brooklyn to lower Manhattan, only to see three immense explosions on New Jersey side of the Hudson, followed by faint booms, and buildings on that side disappearing. People running in the streets, rumors of terrorists with guns, and suddenly it becoming empty. I know I need to run and hide, but I don’t know where. I know it’s pointless to even try and use the phone to call my friend I was supposed to meet here – networks are always down after terrorist acts. I take the skates off and walk, barefoot, uptown, along the river edge, until I find a boat, a shabby looking yacht with too many layers of paint in the little rooms belowdecks – I check and it seems empty – I’ve never sailed a boat like this before, and feel guilty stealing it, but I decide that the owner won’t be looking for it now and I will return it later so I take off, and immediately come across a small tugboat full of water and a scared-looking four-year-old boy standing on the deck in the water up to his chest. I lift him and take him on my boat, thinking that I need to find his parents later – after we are out of here. Being on this boat I already feel safe, dry and warm. Then I get woken up.

Sleep is a way of getting rid of the memories in a way that is good for the brain.

 | Guilio Tononi, cited by Veronique Greenwood in Why Do We Need To Sleep?

As researchers probe outward into the mysterious darkness of sleepiness, these discoveries shine ahead of them like flashlight beams, lighting the way. How they all connect, how they may come together into a bigger picture, is still unclear.

The researchers hold out hope that clarity will come, maybe not next year or the next, but sometime, sooner than you might think. On an upper story at the International Institute for Integrative Sleep, mice go about their business, waking and dreaming, in row after row of plastic bins. In their brains, as in all of ours, is locked a secret.

(via stoweboyd)