digital media ecology
The immersive, turbulent, mediatized flow.
It’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters.
digital media ecology
Whether it’s a handwritten letter, a telephone call, a fax, an email, or a text, the medium through which people communicate shapes what they say and how they say it. Some mediums encourage formal speech while others encourage casual banter. Some are suited to full sentences and well-turned paragraphs; others to sentence fragments and cliches. Some... See more
Nicholas Carr • Diplomacy by WhatsApp
We're developing new cognitive abilities. We just don't know what they are yet.
MLIScardcatalogforlife.substack.com
... See moreThe development of digital technology like this has made spectacle increasingly privatized and solitary. I think it's hard not to conclude that there is a relationship between the rise of solitude in modern life and this process of ever more specific individuation of our attention. The central source of our diversion in the attention age has grown
Imitation and counter-imitation constitute the core of society, ensuring its cohesion, discoveries and innovations, just as habits underlie individual, everyday lives, Tarde argued in The Laws of Imitation (1890),
Vercel Security Checkpoint
Western democracies, by contrast, with our open speech and open systems, are supposed to have a commons, a marketplace of ideas that allows for cross-cutting dialogue and eventual consensus. It has been replaced by an information ecology shaped by algorithmic selection. Content and creators optimized for engagement outcompete everything else—not... See more
Renee DiResta • Crisis of Trust 2026: The Retreat Into Insularity
We are depleted by the pace and structure of contemporary life, particularly by how spatial and temporal boundaries that provided modest respites from the demands others could place on us have been eroded by the capacities of digital technology. Now we are always on and always available, our freneticism masquerading as flexibility. We are also... See more
L. M. Sacasas • What You Get Is the World
In the end, transhumanism and other techno-utopian ideas have served to advance what Lanier calls an “antihuman approach to computation,” a digital climate in which “bits are presented as if they were alive, while humans are transient fragments.” In a way we are already living the dualistic existence that Kurzweil promised. In addition to our
... See moreMeghan O'Gieblyn • God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
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.