In Walden , his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of ... life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” In Thoreau’s terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it.
I think a lot about the way visibility is mediated by digital communication. On apps, the only way to be seen is to speak. Silence is a meaningful form of communication, but it’s not one that social media apps have any patience for
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