Seeing Like a Network
Social networks are just as overcrowded with information right now. The difference is that social networks lean much heavier on tastemakers, influencers, and thought leaders. We can’t comprehend the flood of information out there, so we consume what people we look up to recommend
Kevin Indig • Why I left Substack and the Email renaissance
How social networks are organized, and the fact that connections are not evenly distributed, shapes how information and messages spread from person to person. Access to community, and thus potential for influence, was long determined by in-person relationships.
Renee DiResta • Invisible Rulers
Even more specifically, it is an information problem. Information is the glue that holds networks together. But for tens of thousands of years, Sapiens built and maintained large networks by inventing and spreading fictions, fantasies, and mass delusions—about gods, about enchanted broomsticks, about AI, and about a great many other things. While e
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