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

This instability extends to identity itself. Where offline identity is grounded in lived experience, online identity forms through affinity and alignment. We become collections of interests, allegiances, and aesthetics. The internet’s second self becomes a curatorial project, constantly revised according to shifting community standards and platform... See more

constant, identity-targeted conflict that drives polarization and grievance.

the way that our world – digitally mediated, utterly consumed by capitalism – makes communication about morality very easy but makes actual moral living very hard.

You might also be aware that all this is delivered by means of “persuasive design”—an umbrella term for an armory of psychological techniques borrowed directly from the designers of casino slot machines, for the express purpose of encouraging compulsive behavior. One example among hundreds is the ubiquitous drag-down-to-refresh gesture, which keeps... See more

Bespoke realities are made for—and by—the individual. The collision of the propaganda machine and the rumor mill gave rise to a choose-your-own-adventure epistemology: some news outlet somewhere has written the story you want to believe; some influencer is touting the diet you want to live by or demonizing the group you also hate. Other people,

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We have never been able to document our lives so thoroughly as we now can with the help of digital tools, yet we feel that time is out of joint and that we've lost the thread of both our personal and collective histories. We appear to be both obsessive documenters of our experience, yet largely indifferent to or overwhelmed by the archives we

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The overall digital environment is dictated by tech companies with ruthlessly capitalist, expansionary motives, which do not provide the most fertile ground for culture. While the magazine fashion editor may periodically use their ability to pick out and promote a previously unheard voice, the algorithmic feed never will; it can only iterate on

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