Thesis

Every new medium creates a new environment. As we adapt to the environment, it shapes our perceptions and thoughts, our relationships with others, even our sense of self. The Yale professor John Durham Peters points out that a crucial line in Cooley's article-"social influences act through a mechanism; and the character of their action depends upon

The two things that must always cooperate are human nature and the mechanism of communication. The first is a relatively permanent factor; but the second is highly variable, and is for that reason of peculiar interest and importance. Its variations have generally been in the direction of greater efficiency, and it is largely because of this fact

He dismisses natural selection and heredity as forces of social change. They work too slowly, too haphazardly.

What really matters, he suggests, is communication. Because we humans are "imitative and sympathetic" creatures who adjust our attitudes and behavior in response to social cues, the way we communicate determines, in large measure, the way

When feedback is tied not merely to the way machines work but instead to the things we value most-our social circles, our self-image—it can become the map by which we chart our lives. It can determine how the experiences around us feel. In an era when how a product feels to use is the measure of how much we'll use it, this is everything.

By 2016, Instagram had noticed that its users were talking differently about the product. It had been intended as a service for sharing photos in the moment —but users didn't talk that way about it anymore. They talked about the worry of wanting to curate what they showed other people. They talked about wanting to present the best possible picture.

Instagram came first, in 2010. The app initially just let you share photos and see the photos of friends to whom you were linked.

Soon after it launched came the commonsense policy, popularized by Facebook, of letting your friends like your posts (and, of course, seeing how many likes your friends' posts had gotten). That was the simple act of

One reason we find apps easy to understand even if we've never used them before is that navigability and consistency are so ingrained into the patterns of app design today.