While writing would allow far more knowledge to be preserved and accessed, it would also relieve individuals of the burden of sustaining collective memory themselves. Like writing and print, our use of digital media ordinarily generates an archive (as well as a trail of data, often invisible to users but of great value to others). But although... See more

Other peer groups remain, of course: family, school, colleagues, neighborhoods, religious communities, and so forth. But the formative power of these groups wanes in comparison to that of the digitally mediated audience, which lends the Digital City its Skinner-box quality of instant reinforcement.

New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop.

It is one thing to think with a pamphlet, another to think with a newspaper, yet another to think with a televisual image, and still another to think with a meme.

But free-speech maximalism flourishes in print culture; in the Digital City it appears less desirable. First, print culture sustained the belief that, given a modicum of good sense and education among people, truth would triumph in the marketplace of ideas. Writing and reading are slow and deliberate, encouraging the belief that false ideas will... See more

As late as 2011, journalists and technologists were praising social media’s emancipatory power in light of the role of Facebook and Twitter in the Arab Spring revolts. But, as has been noted many times, after the U.S. presidential election in 2016, such optimism increasingly appeared naïve and misguided. Now Facebook and Twitter are seen as... See more

Information scarcity may lend itself to a measure of credulity: When facts are few, persuading the ignorant is relatively easy. But information abundance, already characteristic of early modern societies, engenders a degree of skepticism: The more there is to know, the more likely we feel that truth is elusive. Information super-abundance, or the... See more

As is now well known, social media platforms have been deliberately calibrated — using likes, retweets, and other reward mechanisms — to hijack our desire for attention and approval.

Writing allowed for the durable storage of knowledge independently of human beings. Not only can written knowledge outlive a particular individual, it can outlive a whole culture.