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
Innovating within an existing platform is always a challenge, because as media theorist Marshall McLuhan argued decades ago, ‘the medium is the message’. TikTok and Twitter/X have short-form content built into the design of the platform, which prevents depth. As I explore in The Bigger Picture, this also leads to what philosopher C. Thi Nguyen... See more
Alexander Beiner • Myth and Metrics: How Social Media Robs Us of Ritual, and How to Revive It
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
How writing can over-persuade us into false certainty versus podcasts’ comfort with tension, doubt, and complex realities.
TRANSCRIPT
You can have epiphany through writing. I mean, I know writers always love the Joan Didion quote. I write to find out what I think. Yeah.
But weirdly, I think you have to be careful with that because sometimes writing is a process of persuading you of what the piece needs you to think. And you got to be careful not to become accidentally persuaded by
... See more
an interview about instant messenger that takes place on instant messenger. the lesson is simple: writing is hard because it forces us to improve our thinking.
how instant messenger shapes thinking
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
via Charles Eisenstein
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
And this is not because our users are some special subset of humanity. They’re... See more
KG • Anthology #1: Reddit
incentives are everything, and Reddit doesn’t reward self-promoters
