Social Media
Essays and more on social media
Packy McCormick and
Social Media
Social 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
Social media to social Media
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
Packy McCormick and
In 1995, Putnam was concerned about teens who were alone 3.5 hours per day. But nowadays teens spend up to nine hours daily staring into screens, according to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychology.
Meanwhile, the amount of time spent with friends has dropped markedly The number of social outings has declined too. Almost every metric... See more
Meanwhile, the amount of time spent with friends has dropped markedly The number of social outings has declined too. Almost every metric... See more
Ted Gioia • 8 Ways of Connecting a Smartphone Can't Deliver
With billions of people using the major social platforms, and the people who remember a pre-social-media web increasing in age while decreasing as cultural force on the internet, we’re rapidly losing fluency in what the internet could look like. We’ve almost forgotten that links are powerful, and that restraining links through artificial scarcity... See more
Anil Dash • “Link in Bio” Is a Slow Knife
Ritual is vital because it gives us a sense that we belong to the world. A sense of connectedness, whether to society, nature or the divine, is in turn linked to a sense of psychological wholeness and lower rates of mental illness.
Social media offers the opposite; connection without relatedness.
Alexander Beiner • Myth and Metrics: How Social Media Robs Us of Ritual, and How to Revive It
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.