The Medium Is The Message

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

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

At present, we seem to be suffering from a widespread failure of literary imagination. We have become worse at imagining the experiences of other people, less inclined to credit these experiences as being as valid and real as our own. Why is this? In part, I think, because of the methods by, and pace at which, we acquire our stories. After all,... See more