Social Media
Essays and more on social media
Packy McCormick and
Social Media
We’ve grown so used to the idea that social media is damaging our democracies that we’ve thought very little about how we might build new networks to strengthen societies. We need a wave of innovation around imagining and building tools whose goal is not to capture our attention as consumers, but to connect and inform us as citizens.
Ethan Zuckerman • Building a More Honest Internet - Columbia Journalism Review
The trouble with the internet, Mr. Williams says, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them.
‘The Internet Is Broken’: @ev Is Trying to Salvage It (Published 2017)
As corporations drape themselves in rainbow colors for Pride month, remember that they only engage in such activism in the West where it's fashionable, and not in the East where it's actually needed, because their activism is motivated not by principles but by PR. https://t.co/jV1VCCRCxZ
Gamification once promised to create a better society, but it’s now used mainly to addict people to apps. The gamifiers, like Skinner’s pigeons, prioritized immediate rewards over delayed ones, so they gamified for the next financial quarter and not for the future of civilization.
Gurwinder • Why Everything Is Becoming a Game
Well, one explanation I liked quite a bit was recently written by Wall Street Journal columnist Christopher Mims, who argued that social media isn’t dying, but changing into broadcast media. The majority of the content we see on a daily basis is now made or shared by a small professional class of users, known as the creator economy. Which is making... See more
Garbage Day • Selling your filter bubble back to you
If you live in the same occidental bubble as me, you might have never heard of WeChat, QQ or VK. Those are immensely popular social networks. In China and Russia. WeChat alone is more or less the size of Instagram in terms of active users. The war in Ukraine also demonstrated that the most popular social network in that part of the world is... See more