MK

Social media showed that everyone has the potential to reach a massive audience at low cost and high gain—and that potential gave many people the impression that they deserve such an audience.

Vigorously participatory curatorial subcultures certainly exist, but in practice, they require too much time and energy to have a broad appeal. People enjoy sharing their discoveries with friends, and they may at least occasionally rate and review items. But most people, most of the time, leave the hard work of curation to others — or to

Twitter was for talking to everyone —which is perhaps one of the reasons journalists have flocked to it.

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.

When we dress to be photographed, we increasingly dress to be distributed as an image, and thus transformed into a kind of ad.

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