MK

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

It’s that these reactions are so normalized online that they’re almost boring.

Cultural production is ever more finely attuned to attention, which is ever more pervasively measured and monetized. Commerce and culture are locked in an ever-tighter embrace.

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.

Welcome to the flat era of fashion. Flat is what happens when consumers buy clothing on the basis of how it looks in two dimensions, in an image to be shared on social media.

Compulsion had always plagued computer-facilitated social networking—it was the original sin. Rounding up friends or business contacts into a pen in your online profile for possible future use was never a healthy way to understand social relationships. It was just as common to obsess over having 500-plus connections on LinkedIn in 2003 as it is to

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.