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?
In the 2010s many of our public spaces started to be molded, physically and literally, by the market advantage of luring patrons looking for highly Instagrammable shots. Businesses that once paid large sums of money to have photographs taken for advertisements that cost even more to run now had access to an army of free labor, taking pictures for... See more
Freddie deBoer • Review: Kyle Chayka's Filterworld
From 2002-2006, social media companies emerged with the explicit mission of "connecting the world," but the introduction of the feed and the like, plus the switch from friends to " followers " indicated a different pitch: "now, even you can a star."
Michael Dean • Tweet
We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood.
Drew Austin • #162: Minimum Viable Self
the GPS/mapping function of the phone is quite useful — but apart from that, our phones really aren’t doing much that our computers don’t do, they’re just portable and thus available to disrupt any potential boredom.
Anne Helen Petersen • Culture Study | Anne Helen Petersen | Substack
via Sam Kriss: A chaser: “Not using a phone taught me what a phone is really for. It’s not for communicating with other people, getting directions, reading articles, looking at pictures, shopping for products, or playing games. A phone is a device for muting the anxieties proper to being alive.”
During my years on Twitter, I became addicted to the ongoing certainty that the next click, the next link would bring clarity. I believed that if I read every last conspiracy theory and threaded tweet, the reward would be illumination. I would finally be able to understand not only what was happening but what it meant and what consequences it would... See more
The media has propagated a new definition of what it means to be a good consumer of information. They want you to read high-velocity content from multiple information streams and be constantly plugged into what’s happening. They can sell the most advertisements this way.
Social products win with utility, not invites (Guest Post) at andrewchen
Sangeet Paul Choudaryandrewchen.com
"Unlike the open source movement or Wikipedia, participants of social networks do not seem to follow a common noble goal, or celebrate a community spirit. The focus here lies on the individual." (Dennis Knopf)