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 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.
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. Speaking of books, Lauren’s been reading “Paradise of the Blind,” 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,” her previous podcast with Recode’s Kara Swisher.
Send the Gadget Lab hosts feedback on their personal Twitter feeds. Arielle Pardes is @pardesoteric and will be back next week. Lauren Goode is @laurengoode. Michael Calore will be back next week, and can be found in the meantime at @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. Our theme song is by Solar Keys.
How to Listen
You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:
If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.
If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Play Music app just by tapping here. You can also download an app like Pocket Casts or Radio Public, and search for Gadget Lab. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.
We’re also on Soundcloud, and every episode gets posted to wired.com as soon as it’s released. If you still can’t figure it out, or there’s another platform you use that we’re not on, let us know.