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?
Regardless, what becomes important is the ability for *any* media to find the humans to enjoy it. And so, there’s likely a future inflection point where having more humans on your project is actually beneficial because it means you start off with a higher likelihood of it being shared. If the extreme becomes that we may be able look at anything for... See more
Simon de la Rouviere • The Human Medium is the Human Message
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
Gurwinder • Why You Are Probably an NPC
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.
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
The problem is, we no longer live solely among those we know well. We're now forced to refine our personalities by the countless eyes of strangers. And this has begun to affect the process by which we develop our identities.
Gurwinder • The Perils of Audience Capture
the internet is the greatest device for opening up the world ever devised. It is democratising and enabling. But that assumes its users draw on it to aid System 2 thinking. Plainly, there are times when we use it to inform key decisions – to find out about an illness, to research a holiday, to track a scientific breakthrough. But in the main the... See more
Will Hutton • We need a social media with heart that gives us time to think
