the information space

Clicks and Conflict

What I learned about media literacy through that is that people do want to be more media-literate, but they also don’t want to be told that they were wrong about something. They want to be let down gently.

Attention Required! | Cloudflare

For the most part, whether we believe something depends on whether and how we trust the source. Whether and how we trust the source often has more to do with our relationship to the source than the source’s relationship to the information.

Everyone’s Existential Crisis

The values in the digitally induced reality have no other expression than the participation of others—as if it were a Ponzi scheme. And it is a Ponzi scheme. Anything viral and “participatory” brings more value to earlier contributors, but this value exists nowhere except in the engagement of later contributors.

Digital reality as a Ponzi scheme: you benefit from replies of others

What we failed to appreciate is that the pursuit of profit would lead the companies beyond the erasure of spatiotemporal boundaries. They would seek to erase the greatest source of friction in their operations: their reliance on human creativity and expression. They would seek to replace the human source of the information they transmit — speakers ... See more

The Erasive Age

We’re now confronting the greatest structural challenge to democracy we’ve ever seen: a truly open society. Without gatekeepers, there are no constraints on discourse. Digital technology has changed everything. Consequently, reality is up for grabs in a way it never has been before.

Zac Gershberg • The Paradox of Democracy

Instead of a productive progression through experiences, we have an increasingly indistinguishable morass.

Kyle Chayka • Filterworld

*My* chief concern is that many readers no longer seem to care who’s presenting “the news” at all — a fact that hustlers of all stripes both exacerbate and capitalize on.

Caitlin • The rise of the online news hustlers

What is a news hustler? Generally speaking, I think of this as an umbrella term for the various independent influencers, streamers, “intelligence monitors,” researchers, commentators and alt media shops — insert air-quotes as needed — who seek to make clout or money off digital news without contributing reporting or analysis to it.