what is Social Media doing to us?
Articles about social media platforms and their effects on society.
Jerod Morris and
what is Social Media doing to us?
The sheer volume of information available puts a lot of pressure on the speed of communication. Creative content must be understood instantly, otherwise there is no traction. The paradox of this output is that it must be familiar and uncomplicated, but also astonishing and new.
Jack Self • THE BIG FLAT NOW: Power, Flatness, and Nowness in the Third Millennium
From 2016 onward, the sense of the internet as a transparent information organizing agent has been in decline. After the algorithms, you could not have a curated, chronological feed of your follows. After the Cambridge Analytic scandal, fears over disinformation and misinformation dominated discussions of our new communications technologies. After 2020, it was no longer a conspiracy theory that the federal government was involved in online censorship. The Elon Musk’s Twitter Files and Mark Zuckerberg’s public apology for caving to pressure from the FBI have corroborated digital dissidents’ accusations.
If the early internet was serving beer and wine that brought people together, today’s internet is dealing crack and fentanyl that tears people apart. The consumer isn’t winning when they are addicted to a product that makes them unhappy, and when they are spending hours each day using products they would pay money to make disappear.
Jonah Peretti • The Anti-SNARF Manifesto
The rise of botlike behavior over the past decade has led to the creation of a meme: the NPC, or Non-Player Character. Originally a term to describe video game characters whose behavior is completely computer-controlled, it now also refers to real world humans who behave as predictably as video game NPCs, giving scripted responses and engaging in s... See more