Social Media
Essays and more on social media
Packy McCormick and
Social Media
Advertisers love how non-paid content blurs with paid content because it makes their ads feel more "authentic." Platforms love it because advertisers love it.
... See moreSocial as a model works when people have about as much to offer as they want to receive along a given axis. But no trait is distributed uniformly; there are are outliers in the nice-to-look-at, nice-to-listen-to, nice-to-read, nice-to-get-stock-tips from axes, there's a population that can offer a respectable performance with these traits, and... See more
Is "Social" an Enduring Category or Just a Phase?
On the death of social media
Human lives in communities. We join them, we sometimes leave them. Social networks should only be an underlying infrastructure to support our communities. Social networks are not our communities. Social network dies. Communities migrate and flock to different destinations.
Stop Trying to Make Social Networks Succeed
people think the solution to the web becoming a big performance stage is to have lots of fragmented smaller communities. But finding the right community is really hard. A better way is to use novel technologies and network mechanics to matchmake in real-time. You get a new community every second depending on what you’re thinking.
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
L. M. Sacasas • The Analog City and the Digital City
fuel to the fire
“As humans we are involved in a dance with things that cannot be stopped, since we are only human through things,” says Hodder. We will continue to perform lifestyles made possible by the Internet whether individual social media platforms survive or not, and even, especially, if we log off for good. Social media altered the world in the same way... See more
Daisy Alioto • What Is Lifestyle?
Other social media platforms followed, leveraging Skinner’s three laws to maximize button-pecking. They offered immediate reinforcement in the form of instant responses, conditioned reinforcement in the form of “likes” and “followers”, and unpredictable reinforcement that varied with each post and each refresh of the page. These features turned
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