The Medium of Text

understanding text as a medium (vs video/image/audio), how it has evolved, and what its future is

Social media is keeping us stuck in the moment

@softspaceninja Not a criticism of the demo! more a comment on the shortcomings of text as an interface. I want to be able to take some text and squish it to get a summary; smash two together to get some AI-inferred conclusions or list of disagreements. Text today is very opaque to most software

Linus twitter.com

Tanuj

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... See more