On Thursday, I will be in attendance as the White House gathers technologists at a social media summit to discuss the growing concern of major tech companies and their role in online bias. While I agree that prejudice against conservative outlets is occurring, I do not believe the crisis is a concerted or purposeful effort. Rather, the bias is a sign of the growing rot among online habits and attention, rooted in the worship of value-defunct information gathering. As Senator Josh Hawley put it in his speech at the Hoover Institution:
“there is something deeply troubling, maybe even deeply wrong, with the entire social media economy…”
The inescapable fact is we spend an excessive amount of time online. As of January 2019, the average American spends 6 hours and 31 minutes using the internet every day. This does not include screen time on phone calls, texting, candy-crushing, using GPS — you get the point. For anyone doing the math, that is a third of our waking day and only 17 minutes less than an average American’s 6 hours and 48 minutes of sleep.
