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

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

This phenomenon in the insect world is known as stigmergy : a mechanism of indirect coordination, where each action leaves a “trace” that makes it easier for a succeeding action to occur.

What does a bookend — an edge — mean for narrative arc? Broadly, it helps define the shape of the arc. The experience of a bundle of content changes depending on how it’s packaged.

The more suffering we try to absorb , the less we’re able to act . This is called psychic numbing. Compassion fatigue. It’s a defense mechanism where empathy and the ability to respond collapses as the scale of tragedy increases. The mind can’t metabolize the infinite, so it shuts down. This is why a single person’s story can sometimes move... See more

I believe we have a duty —or at least anyone who sets themselves up in the world as an intellectual, as I am bold or foolhardy enough to do, has a duty— not to speak in slogans, not to serve as vessels for the speech of others, but instead to struggle to come up with and to share genuinely new ways of comprehending the world, whether through... See more

…what we call content is not an end product. Online, content is more of a social token. It is something that people make, remake, and pass around to say something about themselves and their relationships. It might speak for them or illustrate an idea they share. It serves their conversations, and their conversations embody their relationships.

The

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Significance is subjectivity married to collectivity.

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