Culture
On one hand, we have a booming Creator Economy, with an ever-expanding democratization of tools for production to anyone with an idea. So much so, that according to 1,000 surveyed Americans by ZINE, 86% of people believe there is an overwhelming amount of entertainment available today.
Yet meanwhile on the other hand, we seem to have also found... See more
Yet meanwhile on the other hand, we seem to have also found... See more
Matt Klein • The Creator Paradox: Cultural Stasis Amidst Creative Surplus
Theoretically, a social media feed should heighten awareness and memory, and dilate time, because it selects for content that’s exciting, outrageous, and scary. And yet we seldom remember such content. The reason for this discrepancy is simple: when every post is alarming, your brain quickly becomes desensitised, and starts to interpret alarming... See more
How Social Media Shortens Your Life
An exponential surge in the mass of televisual images, and a commensurate increase in my ability to cut, paste, magnify, and combine them to suit my own fancy, can do nothing but render my interactive TC a more powerful enhancer and enabler of fantasy, my attraction to that fantasy stronger, the real experiences of which my TC offers more engaging
... See moreDavid Foster Wallace • A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Not surprisingly, people report some of the lowest levels of concentration, use of skills, clarity of thought, and feelings of potency when watching television.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Flow: The Psychology of Happiness
To avoid this condition, people are naturally eager to fill their minds with whatever information is readily available, as long as it distracts attention from turning inward and dwelling on negative feelings. This explains why such a huge proportion of time is invested in watching television, despite the fact that it is very rarely enjoyed.
... See moreMihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
What this points to is a critical change in the rhythms of everyday life which occur almost as collateral damage of the development in computation and their deployment in art and media. The French philosopher Henri Lefebvre created the term ‘rhythmanalysis’ to discuss these processes. For him, to understand a society you had to analyse its rhythms... See more
Alfie Bown • Digital Frontier
Late 20th century media was a universe of legible, cohesive objects—films, books, shows, albums, people—which audiences largely experienced as complete entities, not necessarily due to anyone’s preference but because this was the most practical way to read them. Today’s media is a tangle of streams, flows, and feeds that mingle promiscuously and... See more
Drew Austin • Microdosing Life
(With meditative tv) I don’t have to overthink much while watching, but I do have to pay attention, as though I were concentrating on repeating a mantra or focusing my breath. There’s no real emotional investment to make, and little to no connection to whatever problems are going on in the real world.
GQ • In Praise of Meditative TV
The sensation is one of wandering aimlessly, picking up and putting down partly-interesting objects with a sense of generalized indifference. I started noticing something else, too: the impulses powering my behavior weren’t even articulated. The reason for checking and scrolling was rarely in response to an actual inquiry.