MK
@mkay
MK
@mkay
It’s that these reactions are so normalized online that they’re almost boring.
For one, social-media operators discovered that the more emotionally charged the content, the better it spread across its users’ networks.
Welcome to the flat era of fashion. Flat is what happens when consumers buy clothing on the basis of how it looks in two dimensions, in an image to be shared on social media.
This is also why journalists became so dependent on Twitter: It’s a constant stream of sources, events, and reactions—a reporting automat, not to mention an outbound vector for media tastemakers to make tastes.
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.
Moreover, as the critic Rob Horning has argued with respect to TikTok, algorithms do not simply discern what we want and serve it to us; they train us to want what they can serve us. Successful platforms do not just discover what consumers want — they produce the consumers and the forms of consumer desire that they need.