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.

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

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

Anybody can speak, but in an increasingly saturated cultural environment, nobody may be listening. Gatekeepers may no longer control what gets published, but algorithms control what gets circulated. Who sees what — in the domain of culture as well as news and commentary — is governed by opaque and proprietary software.

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

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.&

It’s only on platforms where controversy and drama are prioritized for driving engagement where we’re rewarded for despising each other.