digital media ecology

Fragmented attention serves platforms better than focused attention because fragmented users scroll more, click more, engage more, and stay online longer. Platforms discovered that shorter bursts of content keep people engaged more effectively than longer, deeper content. They built systems that reward and train fragmented attention.

This created a... See more

most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and its mazes of incessant forced connection – this feverish, electric, unlivable hell.

The question “What does it mean?” is essential to reading. Literacy legitimized questioning, an intellectual activity that could not be employed during mechanical repetition after a tradesman or in verbomotor resonance with a storyteller. Questioning the meaning of signs supplied a pattern for questioning the meaning of everything. If orality... See more

We are pantomiming our ideas and convictions rather than living them.

Despite the archival riches and the decentralized architecture, the net’s emphasis on the light-speed transmission of data for commercial gain, combined with our all-too-human hunger for diversion and distraction, has given rise to information empires of unprecedented scope. Our new emperors give us all the information we can consume but starve us... See more

One major benefit of subcultures is that they open up necessary space when the mainstream becomes too crowded. Now, thanks to the internet, everything is supposedly a subculture—the mainstream has supposedly broken into a thousand fragments. One would assume this creates more room for everyone to spread out, literally and figuratively, but even

... See more

News: We are blown hither and thither like litter before the wind. Our days are lumps of undigested experience. You have only to study what newspapers regard as news to see how we are torn and twisted by the irrelevant: in frenzy about issues that do not concern us, bored with those that do.

In short, the technologies through which we see the public shape what we think the public is. And that, in turn, shapes how we behave politically and how we orient ourselves.