OVER AT AMAZON, A NICE REVIEW FOR MY NEW BOOK, from Paul Boutin:
The author, a prolific and popular blogger, USA Today columnist, and frequent TV guest pundit for the past two decades, has curated a set of concise, pointed quotes — some his, many from others — that accurately describe the symptoms of a widespread malaise regarding Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Look at us — have we lost our minds?
Yes, Reynolds writes in all seriousness. Just as haphazardly assembled cities once unwittingly bred lethal plagues, he sees today’s social media platforms as a viral breeding ground for the coinciding mental health epidemics that scholarly studies have already documented — not just among young adults, but at all ages.
Beyond the personal damage is the civic. Reynolds, a law professor, says viral outrage and retaliatory posts almost never meet the U.S. legal bar for “incitement,” but he admits that the online free speech he still champions frequently causes real-world harm. At the personal scale, careers ended and lives shattered for one ill-considered joke. At the national scale, the reaction in political campaign circles to online meddling in the 2016 election is clearly, “We need to do that ourselves.”
Rather than playing expert, Reynolds as a writer builds his case through excepts from news articles, punchy opinion essays, and academic studies. You probably already know the gist of most, but the author — as much editor as writer in this book — constructs a structured, easily-read briefing punctuated by other writers’ well-honed prose. One accurately labels the “gleeful savagery” of online justice. Another bemoans that she now reads “more to be informed than to be immersed, much less to be transported.”
You may arrive at The Social Media Upheaval feeling you already know all this stuff, but you’ll leave with much better words to describe it.
The judge I clerked for said that he was more persuaded by briefs featuring quotes from cases than lawyers’ characterizations of what those cases held, as lawyers would stretch their characterizations, but not change a quote. Likewise, I find a similar approach more persuasive when writing about contested matters, especially when the people I quote aren’t likely to be thought of as ideological or political allies.