digital life—digital cultures

But there’s a whole universe that exists outside of your phone. All you need to do is turn away from the screen—even for just a short while—to understand that the culture of now is embedded in something much, much larger.

When we do that, we start seeing that our legacy from the past is an inherited treasure—and both offers us riches and imposes... See more

But that eternal present is a lie, an illusion, a fabrication of the digital interfaces. And this not only destroys our sense of the past but also undermines our ability to think about the future.

In an environment without past or future, all we have is stasis.

So it’s no coincidence that culture has stagnated in this eternal digital now . The same... See more

It’s not that anyone is forcing us to humiliate ourselves; it’s that we’ve come to equate being known with being exposed.

As much as I share his concerns, this book repeatedly made we want to yell back at him for willfully underplaying obvious exceptions and counterarguments.

Chief among these is to what degree Chayka’s “flattening” is anything new. When he writes, “If anything, mass culture lately appears more aesthetically homogenous than ever,” he seems to forget... See more

the decline of third places means there are fewer places to just hang out and bump into each other. Other economic and social factors have surely contributed to this change, but I suspect that it’s largely due to the new third place—the one in the palm of our hands. We hang out online, which means we don’t hang out at all.

The internet has fundamentally altered the conditions under which genuine self-expression can exist. The solution isn’t to perform authenticity harder, but to recognise and jealously guard the remaining places where real authenticity might still be possible: in unrecorded conversations, in private moments, in closed networks that haven’t yet been... See more

The smartphone turns us into fragmented actors in a perpetual now.

Everyone’s posting about 2016, with a heavy dose of nostalgia.

In 2016, Instagram switched their default feed from purely reverse chronological feed to algorithmically-sorted. In retrospect, this marks the beginning of a shift towards a passive, spoon-fed internet.

Product design matters — people are hungry for digital tools that actually allow them... See more

Another reason for all the division: the self itself is fragmented. As Yancey Strickler says, we are in the era of the post-individual. Strickler’s essay is deep and illuminating, but it is best summarized by a Sean Monahan quote he includes in the article: “Once upon a time people were born into communities and had to find their individuality.... See more