digital media ecology
The immersive, turbulent, mediatized flow.
It’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters.
digital media ecology
Much of what we do is immediately authenticated as we do it, stored as data, classified or scored on some sort of scale, and deployed in real time to modulate some outcome of interest – usually, the behaviour of a person, or a machine, or an organisation.
The sovereign individual and the paradox of the digital age | Aeon Essays
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
Particularly for their young core audiences, creators are the emotional centers of the new information ecosystem. What they have in common is a strong degree of parasociality—their followers feel like they know creators intimately through the screen.
Kyle Chayka • 2024 Is the Year Creators Took Over | the New Yorker
In the post-Narrative age of the Database, we all assume responsibility for improvising our own, often tentative and fragile, narratives about both the world and ourselves. Because narrative is so critical to our sense of identity, however, we are tempted to zealously guard our narratives.
L. M. Sacasas • Narrative Collapse
But the ease of exchanging digital speech has shifted the focus of communication from reflections to reflexes, from substance to attitude.
Media platforms of mind
we run into problems precisely when we start treating technology as an end rather than a means to an end. This is not to say that we can’t be legitimately impressed with technical achievements on their own terms, of course, or admire the skill that makes them possible. But we do well to also judge technologies according to the greater ends they... See more
What Is To Be Done? — Fragments
Today, novelty is overrated.
Does that mean novelty is always bad? No. Does that mean that novelty isn’t also at times a creative re-working of existing ideas in a new context? Also no. But today we are saturated with it, and it’s always worth examining whether the current saturation is actually serving us or whether we are simply being pushed... See more
Does that mean novelty is always bad? No. Does that mean that novelty isn’t also at times a creative re-working of existing ideas in a new context? Also no. But today we are saturated with it, and it’s always worth examining whether the current saturation is actually serving us or whether we are simply being pushed... See more
Adam Robbert • The Lost Art of Memory
The spaces previous generations filled with close human relationships we fill with identities. This is how people are more connected than ever while being lonelier and having fewer close relationships than any generation in modern memory. We’re more connected to the many selves within us than we are to each other.
The Post-Individual
The shift from “yeah” to “yes” or vice versa, a two-hour delay instead of the usual twenty minutes, the use of exclamation points instead of periods—these minute changes can and do often signal real relational ruptures. The problem isn’t that we’re imagining things. The problem is that in learning to read these signs, we become too attuned, seeing... See more