Tech

There is no teleological arc for digital platforms; they don’t move in one direction toward perfection, the way hard drives have been able to store more and more data over time. Instead, it is cyclical, swinging between different strategies of centralization and decentralization like a pendulum.

Gamergate announced our new era, of American life shaped by social media’s incentives and rules, from platforms just beyond the outskirts of mainstream society.

people who use social media frequently perceive significantly more political disagreement in their daily lives than those who do not.

The sharing contest is what produces social gravitation in the web.

The expansion of our technological reach is not increasing our self-efficacy, but undermining it.

Discursive rationality is today under threat from affective communication. We allow ourselves to be easily affected by fast sequences of information. It is quicker to appeal to affect than to rationality. In affective communication, it is not the better argument but the most exciting information that prevails. Fake news is more interesting than fac

Instead of leveling the field between small and large, the open Internet has dramatically tilted it in favor of the most massive players.

The growth in extremism and terrorism is the flip side of ICT (information and communications technology) development. This is the other price that humankind pays for successful Silicon Valley startups.

people keep coming back to social media because they help us do something that makes us distinctively human: create, revise, and maintain our identities to gain social status. Social media allow people to present different versions of themselves, monitor how others react to those versions, and revise their identities with unprecedented speed and ef

In retrospect we should not be surprised that an industry excluded from basic liability and told it would not be held accountable grew up to be irresponsible and unaccountable.