digital media ecology

Media mediate the world for us in our interactions with everything. Therefore, everything we see and experience is, basically, media representations of that everything. There are no economic, political, physical or whatever else phenomena or events that we can experience immediately without the mediation of our tools, interfaces, and technologies.

We have changed our environment enough that our current ways of understanding what’s going on no longer hold: technology and globalization have changed our information streams and our patterns of life drastically enough that the ways we calibrate around incoming information are becoming increasingly dangerous for us, and this trend will only... See more

As the Soviet paleoanthropologist Boris Porshnev once noted, thought and speech require the inhibition of natural reflexes. The need to formulate thoughts and sentences mediates our gut reactions. This makes humans slowpokes compared with animals, but it also facilitates deliberation and cooperation, conferring evolutionary benefits. Writing is the... 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

Increasingly our tech also opens us up to new vectors of anxiety. Regardless of whether you’re working more or less, your nervous system is now plugged into a neurotic and hypersensitive globe-spanning information system that’s constantly pushing unnecessary things into your consciousness. Perversely, this information obesity actually makes us feel... See more

So central is communication to the process of control that the two have become the joint subject of the modern science of cybernetics, defined by one of its founders as "the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal

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 It has been replaced by an information ecology shaped by algorithmic selection.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

As I used to observe with some frequency, the arc of digital culture bends toward exhaustion.

What I mean by this is simple: when we think of the way our days are structured, the kinds of activities most readily on offer, the mode of relating to the world we are encouraged to adopt, etc.—in each case we are more likely to find ourselves spent... See more