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 internet era of culture is a contest between the old model of top-down elite tastemakers telling you what's good and the new numbers-driven viral creator ecosystem in which algorithmic feeds tell you what you like
Kyle Chaykatwitter.comBut an unbounded information landscape is not an unalloyed good. Because social media does not favor accuracy or balance or diversity. It favors clicks. The more engaging and enraging the content, the more clicks it receives.
Scott Galloway • No Mercy / No Malice
How social media algorithms reward clickbait and outrage, shaping creator behavior, language norms, and incentives for extremity.
TRANSCRIPT
I can't believe I stayed. I can't believe I sat here for 11 minutes, wasted 11 minutes of my life on this. One of the things that we used to have access to was this tool called CrowdTangle. So I could actually download all of the videos that these pages had ever put out. I could download the metadata around them, all the titles. And you can see the
... See moreThe illusion persists because there’s so much money in it. Back in 2016, Ben Thompson wrote that Google’s AI efforts were at odds with its business model: “If a user doesn’t have to choose from search results, said user also doesn’t have the opportunity to click an ad, thus choosing the winner of the competition Google created between its... See more
Drew Austin • It's Time to Lie Down and Be Counted
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Today, everything is about speed and real time. We are no longer concerned with real space.
Paul Virilio
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... See more