Social Media

Theoretically, a social media feed should heighten awareness and memory, and dilate time, because it selects for content that’s exciting, outrageous, and scary. And yet we seldom remember such content. The reason for this discrepancy is simple: when every post is alarming, your brain quickly becomes desensitised, and starts to interpret alarming co... See more

An exponential surge in the mass of televisual images, and a commensurate increase in my ability to cut, paste, magnify, and combine them to suit my own fancy, can do nothing but render my interactive TC a more powerful enhancer and enabler of fantasy, my attraction to that fantasy stronger, the real experiences of which my TC offers more engaging

... See more

Late 20th century media was a universe of legible, cohesive objects—films, books, shows, albums, people—which audiences largely experienced as complete entities, not necessarily due to anyone’s preference but because this was the most practical way to read them. Today’s media is a tangle of streams, flows, and feeds that mingle promiscuously and of... See more

The sensation is one of wandering aimlessly, picking up and putting down partly-interesting objects with a sense of generalized indifference. I started noticing something else, too: the impulses powering my behavior weren’t even articulated. The reason for checking and scrolling was rarely in response to an actual inquiry.

we have moved from a culture dominated by entertainment, to one that is dominated by digitally mediated distraction, which in turn generates a culture of addiction, or, as Gioia memorably puts it, Dopamine Culture.

The Internet-Personality-as-Art is ephemeral, challenging, and doesn’t even register as a performance to most critics. Most of it is considered throwaway trash by casual viewers. Crucially, many of those viewers would be correct: not every social media personality is well-constructed, and not every example is art, in the same way not every movie is... See more

The social media personality is one example of a new form. Personalities like Bronze Age Pervert, Caroline Calloway, Nara Smith, mukbanger Nikocado Avocado, or even Mr. Stuck Culture himself, Paul Skallas, are themselves continuous works of expression — not quite performance art, but something like it. They may also be influencers, or they may not ... See more

In just under one generation, we moved from appreciating albums as cohesive works to consuming individual tracks, and then to music becoming reduced to muzak: background noise for gaming, viral videos, or endless scrolling. Disappearing is music as an art in its own right, which commands sustained attention and deep engagement. A song’s success is ... See more

Fashion and music, too, are in decay. Trends are still identifiable, but they lack the clear demarcations of previous decades. Based on clothing styles alone, a photo taken in 2013 could be mistaken for one taken in 2019, a creative stasis unthinkable even thirty years ago. Maybe it’s the rapid cycles of fast fashion, or our smartphone-first social... See more