digital media ecology

constant, identity-targeted conflict that drives polarization and grievance.

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.

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

Political and cultural struggles have moved onto the new media hardware and embraced its settings. Since the main effect of digital media, particularly social media platforms, has been to catalyze self-expression, the cultural, political, and economic significance of identity claims has skyrocketed.

Over the twentieth century, almost all scientific and philosophical disciplines discovered ecology, which is the simple idea that everything is interrelated, that it is impossible to study any phenomenon in isolation, because it impacts, and is impacted by, everything around it. This applies to physics as much as biology, in the discovery of the... See more

Tarde contended that the ‘crowd’ – as a heterogeneous group of individuals, which can be joyful or brutal but dissolves with geographical distance – differs from the ‘public’, a dispersed, like-minded collective with shared cultural references, which historically came into existence with printing, and became established in modernity with the advent... See more

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?

Digital media introduced a new scale, pace, and pattern to human communication, and, in this way, altered how the world is perceived. With regards to scale, we encounter an unprecedented amount of information about the world at large through digital media. With regards to pace, we encounter this information with previously unknown and unrelenting... See more

Even as recently as the 1990s, most people interacted with only their relatives, co-workers, and friends each day, plus maybe their local news anchor on TV. Now, though, those same Paleolithic brains are being bombarded with the thoughts of hundreds of strangers every hour. Modern communication in all its forms has put us in contact with more minds

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