MK

What all of these arguments have in common is that very few people engage in them in real life. Sure, you might be privately annoyed at your friend who’s always talking about how great their life is when they drone on about their perfect mornings, and you might rightfully point out when an author has an unsavory past, but it’s unlikely that the

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. 

Instead of being fed from above a limited diet of standardized cultural products, everyone — not just a minority of highly educated omnivores — can now craft a varied and customized cultural diet from the digital cornucopia. People create these customized diets by sharing the work of “curation” in differentiated niche taste communities. This

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.

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

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.