Severin Matusek

I gave tours of Strange Rules to most of the art world.

I asked the same question every time: are the consequential cultural actors today the people authoring protocols of interaction, or the people creating work inside them?

Despite a few winces, nobody picked the second.

Protocols are the substrate.

Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.

Outstanding original content, for brands to survive in the feed and thrive in this new post-social age of media – from game shows, to video podcasts and educational reels, to those nerd slides you love to save and pass around.

I have come to accept that the tools of the present are not what many of us hoped they would be, but I continue to struggle with the terms we are using to label these platforms. I think that it’s time that we deprecate the label “social media” and begin to recognize that we are dealing with an era of “parasocial media.” I’m not looking to mourn the... See more

It is easy to look back and argue that we were naïve, but I don’t think that is fair. It was not inevitable that social media platforms would become the dumpster fire that they did become.

Parasociality plays a more central role in today’s platforms than it once did. But parasocial relationships are a type of trickster. Attending to parasocial connections may be pleasurable for consumers, but doing so does not strengthen the collective social fabric.

Shifting our orientation from social media to parasocial media is consequential. People can – and initially primarily did – use a wide range of social media to negotiate identity, strengthen relationships, build communities of interest, and find joy in the playfulness of interacting with others (Brock, 2020; Gray, 2009, 2018; Steele, 2021). In the... See more

Technology, not politics, is where power is now being decided and in a changing world, you have to adapt.