Digital Frontier
The vast interconnection enabled by digital platforms has ended up creating more of a sense of sameness than diversity. Users are subtly guided toward the same subsets of topics, urged on by recommendations that are designed not to serve their interests but to create profitable attention fodder to sell to advertisers. Instagram doesn’t care that yo... See more
Welcome to Filterworld｜Dirt
If you take all of our technological innovations of the past two decades—certainly those in the fields of computing and communications—you cannot fail to see that their collective tendency is to breach the wall of isolated selfhood and to swamp us
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
We’ve never had more freedom, more choices. But in reality, most people are subtly funneled into the same streams, the same pools of ‘socially approved’ culture, cuisine and ideas. Remixes and memes abound, but almost no one shares anything weird, original or different. People wake up, perhaps with ambitions to make unique choices they believe are ... See more
Adam Singer • Don't Let Machines or the Crowd Decide Your World
But even by the mid 1990s, the promotional retro-psychedelic euphoria had vanished, as it became clearer that though cyberspace was, in fact, a reinvention of the self, it was transnational corporations doing the reinventing and transforming.
Jonathan Crary • 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
What we lose when we surrender so much of our time and attention to generic technology is not just the opportunity for personal experience, but the chance to create from it our own sense of the world, our place in it and what the future for both might be. The more time we spend visiting places that others have described, the more we follow the path
... See moreMargaret Heffernan • Uncharted
The merging of personalisation and generation represents the ultimate optimisation for media production. Everybody satisfied, all of the time.
But such a simplistic optimisation overlooks the broader implications – those that differentiate entertainment from culture. They inspire a cascade of questions, such as how is human culture changed if we los
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