The Medium Is The Message

It could be said that the success of our human future requires the pursuit of narrative, reflection and empathy. To be sure, we can move in that direction through education, civic discourse and therapy. But if the design of our digital technologies helped us get to where we are, then design can also help get us somewhere better. Indeed, there are a

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.@jesslivingston’s blog post “The Sound of Silence” (2017) perfectly summarizes my frustrations and feelings towards social media. At some point, you realize there might be diminishing returns to being public which is an unfortunate... See more

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

When you sit down with a book, you understand the parameters of engagement. You know how long the book is. The book isn’t changing as you read it. It’s a solid, immutable thing. You and the book are on equal terms in many ways, as least from a physics point of view. You know what’s going to happen, and the book abides by its implicit contract,... 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