MK

Flat is in essence a process of homogenization. Today it doesn’t matter where an influencer lives, because she dresses like she’s from the internet, and that’s all that counts.

Yet the cultural dominance of the iPhone — and the transformation of the open internet into “walled gardens” and apps focused on simplifying the user experience — has taken the “triumph of seamless usability” to a new level. This “tyranny of convenience,” to borrow Tim Wu’s phrase , should sensitize us to what may be lost when democratization proc

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

A democratic cultural politics would be developmentalist — oriented to learning, growth and discovery — rather than presentist. 

TikTok enables and invites the pointed, witty, playful, allusive, zany and endlessly inventive combination of video, music and text. But the creative energies of its more than one billion users are circumscribed and channeled by the architecture of the platform.

TikTok’s spectacular success in enlisting consumers as producers depends on making produ

Inexpensive and user-friendly digital tools for manipulating text, images and sounds — think Photoshop or GarageBand — have dramatically broadened access to the means of cultural production and blurred the lines between amateurs and professionals. But the question is not just how many people engage in cultural production — it’s how people engage.&