digital media ecology

The immersive, turbulent, mediatized flow.

It’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters.

Attention is contagious. What forms of it, as individuals and as a society, do we want to cultivate? What kinds of mediums would that cultivation require?

Ezra Klein • I Didn’t Want It to Be True, but the Medium Really Is the Message

Western democracies, by contrast, with our open speech and open systems, are supposed to have a commons, a marketplace of ideas that allows for cross-cutting dialogue and eventual consensus. It has been replaced by an information ecology shaped by algorithmic selection. Content and creators optimized for engagement outcompete everything else—not... See more

Renee DiResta • Crisis of Trust 2026: The Retreat Into Insularity

in today’s social media environment, identity is behavior. Every action on social media is identity signaling that serves as a request for affirmation. Signaling identity is the digital labor that turns into the perks of socialization within respective digital tribes.

Andrey Mir • The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution

We're developing new cognitive abilities. We just don't know what they are yet.

MLIS cardcatalogforlife.substack.com

This idea that in today’s world, counterculture must embrace invisibility—that it must rest on a bedrock of withdrawal—appeared in every conversation that I had for this article. Biz Sherbert, culture writer and cohost of the podcast Nymphet Alumni, offers a moral angle. “If mass culture runs on conflict,” she says, “then the only real... See more

The Trad Movement Is Sputtering. Here’s What Comes Next

So a medium is a human innovation which enhances, amplifies, extends some human sense or function, as a cup amplifies our ability to drink water or liquid; a telephone, our ability to speak with someone. In turn, this creates a new medium or new human environment for us with new ‘services and disservices’ or affordances and consequences. It makes... See more

3 Reversal

Increasingly our tech also opens us up to new vectors of anxiety. Regardless of whether you’re working more or less, your nervous system is now plugged into a neurotic and hypersensitive globe-spanning information system that’s constantly pushing unnecessary things into your consciousness. Perversely, this information obesity actually makes us feel... See more

Brett Scott • Tech Doesn’t Make Our Lives Easier. It Makes Them Faster

But if the deep roots of boredom are in a lack of meaning, rather than a shortage of stimuli, and if there is a subtle, multilayered process by which information can give rise to meaning, then the constant flow of information to which we are becoming habituated cannot deliver on such a promise. At best, it allows us to distract ourselves with the... See more

The deeper I went, the more I noticed this phenomenon all around me: individuals not guided by legible principles or beliefs, but acting as members of groups playing yin to the other’s yang—well versus weak; awake versus sheep; righteous versus depraved. Binaries where thinking once lived.

Naomi Klein • Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

us versus them tribalism