the techno-social environment

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

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

Once you see yourself as merely a junction point for a whole set of influences, from your parents to your teachers to the feeds you follow and the articles and books you read, you can relax about being ‘you’. You can focus, instead, on making your influence-set as unique, layered and rich as possible. Nobody else will be at your junction point.

Ian Leslie • How To Be Influenced

If professional editors serve as gatekeepers, determining the importance of various stories before publication, the Internet opens the gates, deciding on the significance of content after it’s published. Hence, it’s not just a collective editor—it’s what I call the Viral Editor. Anyone can post anything, including rubbish. But people then vote with... See more

Andrey Mir • The Viral Inquisitor

platforms as assignment editors

collective effervescence : a heightened emotional state resulting from simultaneous social participation. Just as singing gospel music can bring about a deeper connection to God, so too can participating in a meme or TikTok trend.

you're literally worshipping your phone

In these conditions of ontological precarity, forgetting becomes an adaptive strategy.

Mark Fisher • Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?

Feelings are the compass of social navigation. They play the same role in social dynamics as the senses do in physical settings: they guide us. To navigate the social-digital, we need to sense the attitudes of others, just as a tribal individual needs to navigate tribal moods and attitudes. Digital reactions of users evolve (or devolve) into

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

In other words, vibes.

the multi-personal nature of our digital presence. We are forced to be digital multi-persons by the niche design of the platforms, as they seek to extract more of our data and attention by making us exercise the various forms of self-representation.

Andrey Mir • The platform paradox

self-representations in order to co-produce the digital mirror-world.

Platforms have imbued crowds with new qualities. They are no longer fleeting and local, but persistent and global. They engage symbiotically with influencers, but don’t require a leader or physical space to assemble. Platform affordances empowered crowds; they are now active participants in chronicling history and shaping narratives.
Invisible

When digital media reversed cognitive detachment into situational immersion, it set off other reversals. The structured, fixed world built by literacy reversed into a “natural” flow: the newsfeed pouring into our devices. The flow has no structure or completeness, typical of literacy. As soon as structuring, selection, and completeness are