MK

The means of circulation are algorithmic, and they are not subject to democratic accountability or control. Hyperconnectivity has in fact further concentrated power over the means of circulation in the hands of the giant platforms that design and control the architectures of visibility.

The inherent contextlessness of platforms like Twitter also works in the opposite direction, though: It’s easy to use the language of social justice to justify anything we want, and by doing so, weakens real, meaningful activism.

For one, social-media operators discovered that the more emotionally charged the content, the better it spread across its users’ networks.

Truly democratizing cultural creativity, one might argue, would promote the development of skills and capacities rather than minimize the need for them.

Twitter was for talking to everyone —which is perhaps one of the reasons journalists have flocked to it.

Anybody can speak, but in an increasingly saturated cultural environment, nobody may be listening. Gatekeepers may no longer control what gets published, but algorithms control what gets circulated. Who sees what — in the domain of culture as well as news and commentary — is governed by opaque and proprietary software.

The whole idea of social networks was networking : building or deepening relationships, mostly with people you knew. How and why that deepening happened was largely left to the users to decide.