what is Social Media doing to us?
Jerod Morris and
what is Social Media doing to us?
Jerod Morris and
In his note, Abramov, who’s worked at the social network for four years, compared Facebook to a nuclear power plant. Facebook, unlike traditional media sources, can generate “social energy” at a scale never seen before, he said.
“But even getting small details wrong can lead to disastrous consequences,” he wrote. “Social media has enough power to
... See moreIllich’s anecdote is, of course, a provocative reversal of the usual way that new media tend to be presented as a necessarily democratizing and empowering force, and it seems closer to mark as the events of the last decade or so have illustrated. The ostensible promise of social media was that anyone’s voice could now be heard. Whether anyone would
... See moreFrom 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.
“There will be only answers,” the writer Marguerite Duras said in 1985 when a TV show asked her to make a prediction about the year 2000. “The demand will be such that there will only be answers. All texts will be answers… about [man’s] body, his corporeal future, his health, his family life, his salary, his leisure. It’s not far from a nightmare.
... See moreFor example, a small study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard looked at the IQ of some of their workers in two situations. At first they tested their IQ when they were not being distracted or interrupted. Then they tested their IQ when they were receiving emails and phone calls. The study found that ‘technological distraction’ – just getting emails
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