digital media ecology

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

In the philosophical framework of Louis Althusser, the concept of interpellation, often referred to as hailing, is described as a general and subconscious mechanism through which ideological systems present individuals with specific identities, which they are encouraged to embrace.

But they have nonetheless grown up with an acute consciousness of having an externalized double—a digital double, an idealized identity that is partitioned from their “real” selves and that serves as a role they must perform for the benefit of others if they are to succeed. At the same time, they must project the unwanted and dangerous parts of

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Significance is subjectivity married to collectivity.

If there is one thing the advent of social media has brought home to us, it is how little we think for ourselves.

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

This idea that in today’s world, counterculture must embrace invisibility—that it must rest on a bedrock of withdrawal—appeared in every conversation that I had for this article. Biz Sherbert, culture writer and cohost of the podcast Nymphet Alumni, offers a moral angle. “If mass culture runs on conflict,” she says, “then the only real... See more

Never before in history have so many people been under the gaze of so many strangers. Humans evolved in small groups, defined by kinship: those we knew, knew us. And our imaginative capabilities allowed us to know strangers—kings and queens, heroes of legend, gods above—all manner of at least partly mythic personalities to whom we may have felt as... See more

In complex, modern societies, the relationship between reality and our representations of reality—between what Lippmann called the “real environment” and the “pseudo-environments” that make up our mental models of the real environment—is heavily mediated by complex chains of trust, testimony, and interpretation.