the techno-social environment

It’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters

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

Brett Scott • Tech Doesn’t Make Our Lives Easier. It Makes Them Faster

The network is less a tool than a habitation, less an apparatus than an environment. We don’t just use it to get things done. We are, as Adorno foresaw, incorporated into it as components. We’re nodes, continuously receiving and transmitting signals. The ethos of the system is one of documentation and representation. We’re all jointly engaged in... See more

All the Little Data

Every new medium creates a new environment. As we adapt to the environment, it shapes our perceptions and thoughts, our relationships with others, even our sense of self.

Nicholas Carr • Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

Postman: Technological change is ecological…One significant change generates total change.

“Each medium creates a new orientation for thought, expression, and sensibility.”

Information and media abundance have made us cognitively impatient. We don't want to spend the time.

Revenge of the Followers

nytimes.com

But it is not clear whether such systems – even if they work as advertised – can solve the problem of reliable knowledge in a balkanised public sphere. Just as commercial incentives led to fake content and filter-bubbles, LLMs likely face the same pressures in a world of sharply diminishing returns. Because the firms training them desperately need... See more

The sovereign individual and the paradox of the digital age | Aeon Essays

Platforms have imbued crowds with new qualities. They are no longer fleeting and local, but persistent and global. They engage symbiotically with influencers, but don’t require a leader or physical space to assemble. Platform affordances empowered crowds; they are now active participants in chronicling history and shaping narratives.
Invisible

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.

Andrey Mir • My new book: The Viral Inquisitor and Other Essays on Postjournalism and Media Ecology

Technology doesn’t follow culture so much as culture follows technology. New forms of expression naturally arise from new media, but so do new sensibilities and new behaviors
Tim Wu, Attention Merchants