MK

The flip side of that coin also shines. On social media, everyone believes that anyone to whom they have access owes them an audience...

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.

... 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.

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.

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.