The Medium Is The Message

I think a lot about the way visibility is mediated by digital communication. On apps, the only way to be seen is to speak. Silence is a meaningful form of communication, but it’s not one that social media apps have any patience for

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

Looking around, it’s easy to be disheartened about people and the state of the world, but on Reddit I have experienced the opposite: people naturally create community, and they are smarter, funnier, and more helpful and caring than I think we often give them credit for.

And this is not because our users are some special subset of humanity. They’re... See more