The Medium Is The Message
related to marshall mcluhans - we shape the communication tool, then it shapes us
sari and
The Medium Is The Message
What’s amazing is that things like hashtag design—these essentially ad hoc experiments in digital architecture—have shaped so much of our political discourse. Our world would be different if Anonymous hadn’t been the default username on 4chan, or if every social media platform didn’t center on the personal profile, or if YouTube algorithms didn’t... See more
Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
Similarly, I think people need to ask themselves – and it might be easier if we ask each other – What do you really want to be doing? How did you fall in love in the first place? People start optimizing for things like “hm, if I did this I would get 5% more traffic” or “I would get to the next follower milestone” I think because it’s visible, and... See more
Anna Dorothea Ker • "People First" - Making Tech Work for You
Visakan on putting the goal first. What do you really want to be doing? Why? With Whom? ? How? The tools are just scaffolding, support structures, facilitators. What specific outcomes do you actually want?
it’s utterly impossible for an algorithmic video-sharing website like TikTok to be a “town square” in the same sense that Twitter was supposed to be. There are all sorts of McLuhan-esque reasons for this: text as a medium is much faster to read, the reply and quote tweet function is what makes Twitter dialogic, its focus on text makes verbal wit... See more
Erik Hoel • The internet's "town square" is dead
The largest companies today are obsessed with generating content in a completely de-ritualized context. But content always exists in tension with form. Ritual is the form we have abandoned in our relentless quest for content.
Ted Gioia • 13 Observations on Ritual
addictive scrolling and swiping can never achieve the sense of closure and boundedness we all crave.
Shaped intentionally or not, each medium’s fundamental materials and constraints give it a “grain” which make it bend naturally in some directions and not in others.