MK

... 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.

This was what personal style was to me in 2008: a cipher for something much broader, a glimpse into the lives of others.

That changed when social networking became social media around 2009, between the introduction of the smartphone and the launch of Instagram. Instead of connection—forging latent ties to people and organizations we would mostly ignore—social media offered platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their

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

Community moderation works . This was the overwhelming lesson of the early internet. It works because it mirrors the social interaction of real life, where social groups exclude people who don’t fit in. And it works because it distributes the task of policing the internet to a vast number of volunteers, who provide the free labor of keeping forums

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

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.