digital media ecology
The immersive, turbulent, mediatized flow.
It’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters.
digital media ecology
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
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 It has been replaced by an information ecology shaped by algorithmic selection.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
So I do think this characteristic of the internet can be harnessed in a positive direction, but it starts with affordances, which is the psychological term for something that makes it easier to do something else. And we have platforms designing their affordances for negativity to spread by targeting high arousal, engagement, emotions. Humans follow... See more
Does Virality Concern Reality?
Narratives seek closure (the story must end). The Database is open-ended (it assimilates new data indefinitely). The Database resists the Narrative impulse to control and stabilize meaning.
L. M. Sacasas • Narrative Collapse
Any social media activity is a request to unknown others for affirmation. It flips personal conversations into public exhibitions.
Andrey Mir • The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution
If you don’t have your counterparty’s trust — or piggyback on someone who does — an exchange of ideas can’t even begin.
Casually, trust is like a currency in that way.
Casually, trust is like a currency in that way.
Mike Elias • Epistemic Reserve Notes
Trust in like currency and creators are trust brokers.
... See moreThis rearrangement of social and economic conditions around the pursuit of attention is, I'm going to argue, a transformation as profound as the dawn of industrial capitalism and the creation of wage labor as the central form of human toil. Attention now exists as a commodity in the same way labor did in the early years of industrial capitalism.
The
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