my social feeds seemed to finish their years-long transformation from a neighborhood populated with friends to a glossy condo development of brands.
Anne Helen Petersen • Culture Study | Anne Helen Petersen | Substack
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my social feeds seemed to finish their years-long transformation from a neighborhood populated with friends to a glossy condo development of brands.
Platforms have boxed our social lives and creative endeavors into slick, hyper-designed perimeters, guiding users through algorithmically perfect scrolls.
Eileen Isagon Skyers • Dirt: Are we post-platform?
It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon.
Social media was never a natural way to work, play, and socialize, though it did become second nature.
The shift began 20 years ago or so, when networked computers became sufficiently ubiquitous that people began using them to build and manage relationships. Social n
... See moreIan Bogost • The Age of Social Media Is Ending
Facebook’s goal of showing people only what they were interested in seeing resulted, within a decade, in the effective end of shared civic reality.
Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
I was entering adulthood and trying to live my childhood dream, but now, to be “authentic,” I had to be the product I had long been posting online, as opposed to the person I was growing up to be.
New York Times • Opinion | YouTube Gave Me Everything. Then I Grew Up.
We have generated billions of dollars for social media platforms through our desire—and then through a subsequent, escalating economic and cultural requirement—to replicate for the internet who we know, who we think we are, who we want to be.
Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
This problem of overabundance is why I wrote my piece last year. As consumption of digital media increased, we began to see a larger volume of curators — coolhunters, just like Gladwell had outlined in ’97, but this time in a digital space. On Tumblr, this looked like blogs of curated art or photography; on Pinterest, we saw well-crafted collection... See more