What would it take for you to delete all of your tweets? What would it take to delete your social media accounts?
These are the questions Arielle Pardes and Lauren Goode grapple with on this week’s Gadget Lab podcast (Mike is out this week; he lost his voice, undoubtedly from shouting into the void). Earlier this week Arielle visited Instagram, where the Facebook-owned company unveiled new tools for “digital wellness”; essentially, tools that let you keep tabs on how long you’ve been on social media, so you can cut back if it’s making you feel bad. And our WIRED colleague Emily Dreyfuss wrote about her tweet-deleting experiment – as well as the immediate sadness she felt upon deleting all of her tweets. Social media: Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.
Some notes: You can read Arielle’s story here[1] about Facebook and Instagram’s efforts around “digital wellness,” a term about as meaningful as moon juice. Emily Dreyfuss’s latest story about deleting her tweets can be found here[2].
Recommendations this week: Arielle recommends WIRED’s multi-part package on how to read. Yes, you read that right. It’s a series of stories about the joy of reading, in all forms. Check out Arielle’s story on audiobooks here[3]. Speaking of books, Lauren’s been reading “Paradise of the Blind,”[4] a novel published in the late 1980’s about post-war Vietnam (the book has been banned in Vietnam). And as a bonus recommendation, she suggests you check out the very last episode of “Too Embarrassed to Ask,”[5] her previous podcast with Recode’s Kara Swisher.
Send the Gadget Lab hosts feedback on their personal Twitter feeds. Arielle Pardes is @pardesoteric[6]...