MK
@mkay
MK
When we dress to be photographed, we increasingly dress to be distributed as an image, and thus transformed into a kind of ad.
Dirt • Dirt | Substack
The inherent contextlessness of platforms like Twitter also works in the opposite direction, though: It’s easy to use the language of social justice to justify anything we want, and by doing so, weakens real, meaningful activism.
Vox • Every "chronically online" conversation is the same
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.
Ian Bogost • The Age of Social Media Is Ending
Yet, the final component of the streaming ecosystem — artists and their teams — are still pretty much where they were in 2010 regarding algorithmic optimization. Today, most algorithmic strategies follow a kind of "throw spaghetti at a wall and see what sticks" approach: make sure that the metadata you provide to DSPs is as complete and accurate as... See more
Music Tomorrow • Towards Recommender System Optimization: Our Data Tool for Algorithmic Optimization on Spotify [Part 1]
Flattening and taste
2020 was the first year when streaming services overtook "family and friends" as the primary channel for music discovery, with over 62% of music listeners in the US naming DSPs among their top discovery sources.
Music Tomorrow • Towards Recommender System Optimization: Our Data Tool for Algorithmic Optimization on Spotify [Part 1]
Yet the cultural dominance of the iPhone — and the transformation of the open internet into “walled gardens” and apps focused on simplifying the user experience — has taken the “triumph of seamless usability” to a new level. This “tyranny of convenience,” to borrow Tim Wu’s phrase , should sensitize us to what may be lost when democratization
... See moreRogers Brubaker • Hyperconnected Culture and Its Discontents
Researchers have found instead that the distribution of attention remains highly unequal across a wide range of digital contexts, ensuring the hypervisibility of a few and the invisibility or near-invisibility of the great majority. The winner-take-all (or winner-take-most) logic, sustained in part by algorithms that ratify and reinforce what is
... See more