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Rebecca Jennings writes today that Instagram makes us, individually, look wonderful all the time. Twitter, by contrast, makes us, collectively, look outrageous and appalling all the time. What happens when you follow both?

Beats me. But I am becoming ever more convinced that social media provides us with such a distorted view of the world that we would all be better off without it. Each of us may be convinced that, of course, we take all this into account and don’t believe everything we see, but I’m skeptical that any of us can really do this no matter how hard we try. Twitter in particular provides a view of the world so massively distorted that we can hardly help but come away from it convinced that society is about to collapse any second now.

That’s my cheery thought for Monday morning. And now I’m off to get livesaving chemicals dripped into my body. Have a nice day!

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And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

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