internet culture

Digital platforms are largely devoted to making users consume more, faster—think of TikTok’s frenetic “For You” feed or Spotify’s automated playlists. Curators slow down the unending scroll and provide their followers with a way of savoring culture, rather than just inhaling it, developing a sense of appreciation.

In our present technological era, humans have also needed a new framework to avoid drowning in the daily firehose of entertainment, media, and information. Given this setting of increasing complexity, it becomes more appealing to use an associative concept like “vibes” as a simplifying framework for understanding or self-expression. If we can’t... See more

If technology-inflected solitarist identity makes it difficult or impossible to identify and admire heroes, saints and sages, then it will be difficult or impossible for us to learn how to live well in the digital age.

Agentic software designs for and explicitly allows user-made desire paths and folk-usages of software. People will use software in whatever informal, distributed ways that emerge from real world contexts. Folksonomies are a great example of these informal taxonomies developed by users on social sharing platforms. Tumblr tags, for example, have... See more

Our search for solutions should begin with the binary thinking that is at the heart of the problem. Psychologists suggest that we can mitigate binary thinking by developing cognitive flexibility — that is, engaging with the complexity and variability of real life by taking into account multiple points of view. This is part of what we call empathy.

This situation, where more data is the goal, means there is great collection software and terrible decision making software. We are told to star, favorite, and bookmark everything. Yet, like real life hoarders, we cannot say what exactly we collected or why. Nor can we find any of it. How many times have you spent an hour trying to find that one... See more