Kit Agnitti
@kitagnitti
Kit Agnitti
Social media is not successful because it goes against our instincts and desires. It's successful because it gives us what we want. As a machine for harvesting atten-tion, its productivity is unmatched. As a machine for bending the will, it is a triumph of efficiency. In engineering what we pay attention to, it also engineers much else about us—how
... See moreSuperbloom by Nicholas Carr 78
Speech and other forms of human expression are raw materials to be processed mechanically. That's exactly the view social media companies have come to take. Just as a potato chip or a cigarette is meticulously engineered to trigger certain biological reactions in the human body and mind-pleasure and craving, notably-so communication is now engineer
... See moreSuperbloom by Nicholas Carr 77
Thanks to its success in attracting and holding an audience, and despite the controversies surrounding the content it dishes out, Facebook's algorithmic News Feed quickly became the template for other social media platforms and then for traditional media companies as they shifted their offerings online. Everyone rushed into the business of informat
... See moreSuperbloom by Nicholas Carr 74
For Claude Shannon, the fundamental problem of communication had been getting a message from one place to another as quickly as possible without distortion. For Mark Zuckerberg and his Silicon Valley mates, the fundamental problem of communication was putting the most resonant message in front of an individual at the most opportune moment. The esse
... See moreSuperbloom by Nicholas Carr 68-69
Levy later reported on the scene playing out inside Facebook's headquarters while the users were fuming:
Sanghvi and her team were looking at the logs and finding something amazing. Even as hundreds of thousands of users expressed their disapproval of News Feed, their behavior indicated that they felt otherwise. Users were spending more time on Face
... See moreSuperbloom by Nicholas Carr 66
The "semantic aspects" of communication were irrelevant to its calculations. But whereas Shannon and his Bell System employer were concerned only with the transmission of information-the transport function-the Facebook algorithm made editorial decisions. It selected what people would see or not see through a statistical analysis of their past behav
... See moreSuperbloom by Nicholas Carr 64
Content has collapsed, as our adoption of the drab, generic term content to refer to all forms of expression testifies.
Everything now has to fit the internet's conventions and protocols, with their stress on immediacy, novelty, multiplicity, interconnect-edness, and above all efficiency. The brakes that were imposed, by necessity more than design,
... See moreSuperbloom by Nicholas Carr 63
The free-market spirit permeated the sweeping Telecommunications Act of 1996. Promoted with great enthusiasm by President Bill Clinton and his technophilic vice president, Al Gore, the legislation stripped away most of the market strictures that had defined the structure of the media industry since the Communications Act of 1934. It erased the boun
... See moreSuperbloom by Nicholas Carr 61
That the spread of mass media was accompanied by the rise of Nazism and other totalitarian movements seemed like more than a coincidence to many observers. Broadcasting's centralized design, with its concentration of power and its tight control of information, seemed to mirror the political structure of the authoritarian state.
In the United States
... See moreSuperbloom by Nicholas Carr