the techno-social environment
It’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters
the techno-social environment
This majority illusion can trick you into believing that a minority opinion is the dominant consensus point of view overall when it’s really the viewpoint of the loudest or best connected members of a community.
Invisible Rulers
Different genres, same engine: trust earned through charisma, resonance, and the steady performance of alignment, inside a media ecology built for niches.
Renee DiResta • Crisis of Trust 2026: The Retreat Into Insularity
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
L. M. Sacasas • Narrative Collapse
Bits of information provide neither meaning nor orientation. They do not congeal into a narrative. They are purely additive. From a certain point onward, they no longer inform — they deform. They can even darken the world. This puts them in opposition to truth. Truth illuminates the world, while information lives off the attraction of surprise,... See more
NOEMA • All That Is Solid Melts Into Information
The worlds we now inhabit are digitized realms incapable by their nature and design of generating a broadly shared experience of reality.
L. M. Sacasas • From Common Sense to Bespoke Realities
Believing that AI will save time is like being a person in the late 1800s seeing their first car and thinking “oh how easy it’ll be to get to the meadow now!” People back then didn’t imagine that by the 1960s we’d be stuck in traffic jams for hours in mega-cities. Now apply this to AI. If we fast-forward a decade, it will have recalibrated the... See more
Brett Scott • Tech Doesn’t Make Our Lives Easier. It Makes Them Faster
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?
Ezra Klein • I Didn’t Want It to Be True, but the Medium Really Is the Message
The media and society can be understood as conversations - Jeff Jarvis