digital media ecology
It’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters
digital media ecology
The more benefits a network provides, the more it enslaves its users.
Three factors keep us on a given platform: its monopolistic aptitude, its habit-forming design, and the fact that users can earn a return on their investment only on the platform they’re invested in. Much like a genie enslaved to his lamp, users cannot escape these magical apps.
Three factors keep us on a given platform: its monopolistic aptitude, its habit-forming design, and the fact that users can earn a return on their investment only on the platform they’re invested in. Much like a genie enslaved to his lamp, users cannot escape these magical apps.
Andrey Mir • The platform paradox
Information and media abundance have made us cognitively impatient. We don't want to spend the time.
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
a super-stimulus system optimized to fulfill our desires.
Jon Askonas • The New Control Society
The Database dramatically expands access to information, challenging the authority of even the most venerable professional weavers of Narrative. Official narratives are just one more datapoint, one more entry in the Database, one way among many of generating a path through the entries.
L. M. Sacasas • Narrative Collapse
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
From, The Master Switch. Mid-century TV networks were probably the most powerful, centralized information system in history.
“To say that any technology or extension of man creates a new environment is a much better way of saying the medium is the message. Moreover this environment is always invisible and its content is always the old technology.”
3 Reversal
... See moreBespoke realities are made for—and by—the individual. The collision of the propaganda machine and the rumor mill gave rise to a choose-your-own-adventure epistemology: some news outlet somewhere has written the story you want to believe; some influencer is touting the diet you want to live by or demonizing the group you also hate. Other people,