MK

When I first got access to the internet as a kid, the very first thing I did was to find people who liked the same things I liked — science fiction novels and TV shows, Dungeons and Dragons, and so on. In the early days, that was what you did when you got online — you found your people , whether on Usenet or IRC or Web forums or MUSHes and MUDs.

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.

Character is gone, because eccentricity is harder to duplicate and sell in bulk.

On the old internet, you could show a different side of yourself in every forum or chat room; but on your Facebook feed, you had to be the same person to everyone you knew. 

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.

A social network is an idle, inactive system—a Rolodex of contacts, a notebook of sales targets, a yearbook of possible soul mates. But social media is active—hyperactive, really—spewing material across those networks instead of leaving them alone until needed.

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