MK

Some invest a lot of time and skill in crafting TikTok videos, but neither time nor skill is required. If TikTok “enables everyone to be a creator,” as its former mission statement proclaimed, this is because creative labor on the platform has been automated and deskilled.

Social media showed that everyone has the potential to reach a massive audience at low cost and high gain—and that potential gave many people the impression that they deserve such an audience.

When we dress to be photographed, we increasingly dress to be distributed as an image, and thus transformed into a kind of ad.

... people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this mu ch . They shouldn’t have that much to say, they shouldn’t expect to receive such a large audience for that expression, and they shouldn’t suppose a right to comment or rejoinder for every thought or notion either.

It’s become something of a sport to unearth these sorts of replies, the ones where strangers make willfully decontextualized moral judgments on other people’s lives. We give these people and these kinds of conversations names: “chronically online” or “terminally online,” implying that too much exposure to too many people’s weird ideas makes us all

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.