Digital affordances seem to often constitute what Marshall McLuhan would call ‘hot media’ (1967), which require little active participation on the part of the audience, and are of highly predictable nature. Rosa would insist that to achieve resonance, we would want to cool media down to encourage active participation – a prerequisite for resonant... 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
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.
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
the medium - not just what the person is made of - dictates what is shared
McLuhan argued that, pushed to its limits, a medium flips or reverses its characteristics.
Internet scale pushes information into disinformation, connection into loneliness, and desire into apathy.
Still need a study on how YouTube comments became incredibly civilized and wholesome
While Instagram comments became the absolute meanest place on the internet