In all the clamour over ‘the virtual’ and ‘the digital’, we tend to forget that social media is more about the social than the media - it’s about people coming together and what people think about us and what we think of ourselves because of that.
Someone asked how I manage social media engagement and roll it into practice.
1. Retain full bodily awareness, full field awareness if possible, mindful of all thoughts and feelings arising in reaction at all times while engaging with the glassy simulacrum. Don't collapse in and fixate.
2.... See more
Hear me out — what if instead of trying to keep up with UGC (won't work) someone started a news organization to only publish once a week with a high-quality investigation of all the biggest news of the previous week?
As late as 2011, journalists and technologists were praising social media’s emancipatory power in light of the role of Facebook and Twitter in the Arab Spring revolts. But, as has been noted many times, after the U.S. presidential election in 2016, such optimism increasingly appeared naïve and misguided. Now Facebook and Twitter are seen as... See more
Hamish McKenzie: On social media, posers are often given the most status points, and so we’re left with a misleading idea of authority; it seems the people who are loudest in their claims to be experts — the ones we hear from most on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube — are the ones to be most wary of. When self-proclaimed experts are ultimately... See more
“The internet, as we have known it, has evolved from a quaint, quirky place to a social utopia, and then to an algorithmic reality. In this reality, the primary task of these platforms is not about idealism or even entertainment — it is about extracting as much revenue as possible from human vanity, avarice, and narcissism.”