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Spotify, for example, has invested heavily in its own curation services — both algorithmic and human — after finding that many of its listeners were baffled by superabundance, burdened by excessive choice and uninterested in charting their own paths through the digital wilderness.

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. 

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

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

A democratic cultural politics would be developmentalist — oriented to learning, growth and discovery — rather than presentist. 

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.