The Medium of Text

Reading is alluring. It has a nameless quality beyond satisfying desires for information and pleasure. Despite more colorful and interactive media, reading text somehow remains more refined, more seductive.

When I think about editing images, a vast array of options come to mind: contrast, saturation, sharpen, blur, airbrush, clone stamp, etc. Even basic image editors offer dozens of useful image manipulation tools.

When I think about editing text, a much narrower definition comes to mind: cut, copy, paste, find, replace, spell check — nothing that modi... See more

it’s utterly impossible for an algorithmic video-sharing website like TikTok to be a “town square” in the same sense that Twitter was supposed to be. There are all sorts of McLuhan-esque reasons for this: text as a medium is much faster to read, the reply and quote tweet function is what makes Twitter dialogic, its focus on text makes verbal wit th... See more