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Realize that the internet and social media, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit is mostly bullshit. These apps are used daily by losers. Even if a successful person posts on Twitter or Instagram, that’s only 5% of their life, the rest of their time spend with firends, on gym or reading productive book. If people are…
The real lesson of the GITS Laughing Man for the digital age is not about myth or becoming a folk hero. Anti-corpo is just the surface level It is about copycats and the viral spread of memes. Not all memes succeed in going viral. But Once everyone (even foreign adversaries manufacturing outrage) amplifies a meme, it…
Of the platforms where we know flesh and blood humans do spend enough time, 92% of all content is created by 10% of all users, and engagement with different posts can vary from 0.03% to 0.1% of all viewers. In other words, of the 52.6% of internet traffic which is human-driven, about 9 in 10 users stuck to messaging…
Civil disobedience in the attention economy means withdrawing attention. But doing that by loudly quitting Facebook and then tweeting about it is the same mistake as thinking that the imaginary Pera is a real island that we can reach by boat. A real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind. What…
Connectivity is the rapid circulation of information among compatible units—an example would be an article racking up a bunch of shares very quickly and unthinkingly by like-minded people on Facebook. With connectivity, you either are or are not compatible. Red or blue: check the box. In this transmission of…
‘The idiot does not “communicate”’,2 writes philosopher Byung-Chul Han in Psychopolitics. He may speak, sure, but not to convey a certain message. That makes the idiot instantly subversive in our time, where communication counts among the highest goods. Not so much because we value the exchange of information or…
Caufield makes clear digital gardening is not about specific tools – it's not a Wordpress plugin, Gastby theme, or Jekyll template. It's a different way of thinking about our online behaviour around information - one that accumulates personal knowledge over time in an explorable space. Caufield's main argument was…
The Garden is an old metaphor associated with hypertext. Those familiar with the history will recognize this. The Garden of Forking Paths from the mid-20th century. The concept of the Wiki Gardener from the 1990s. Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens. The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s…
While there is nothing inherently addictive about smartphones themselves, the true drivers of our attachments to these devices are the hyper-social environments they provide. Thanks to the likes of Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and others, smartphones allow us to carry immense social environments in our pockets…
Engagement algorithms are simple. If you, the user, have engaged with a certain topic in the past, you are likely to engage in the future. So when a new piece of content is created on the platform that belongs to that topic, why not show it to you? You might even give it a thumbs up (or like, or heart). This selection…
The technical architecture of online platforms, on the other hand, should be designed to dampen harassing behavior, while shielding targets from harassing content. It means creating technical friction in orchestrating a sustained campaign on a platform, or engaging in sustained hounding. For example, what if, after…
As our modern dinosaurs crash down around us, I sometimes wonder what kind of humans will eventually walk out of this epic transformation. Trump and the populism that’s rampaging around the world today, marked by xenophobia, racism, sexism, and rising inequality, is greatly amplified by the forces the GDE has…
17776: What football will look like in the future by Jon Bois — SB Nation A serial piece about space probes in the far future that have gained sentience and are watching humanity play an evolved form of American football. GIFs, animations, and found digital media galore. Adrien Brody by Marie Calloway An account of…
In July, NPR.org recorded nearly 33 million unique users, and 491,000 comments. But those comments came from just 19,400 commenters, Montgomery said. That's 0.06 percent of users who are commenting, a number that has stayed steady through 2016. When NPR analyzed the number of people who left at least one comment in…
These results highlight several features of emotional contagion. First, because News Feed content is not “directed” toward anyone, contagion could not be just the result of some specific interaction with a happy or sad partner. Although prior research examined whether an emotion can be contracted via a direct…
In my 2016 book, Deep Work, I proposed a strictly binary approach to social media: you should perform an honest cost/benefit analysis on the social media platforms in your life, and quit all services that don’t provide substantially more benefits than costs with respect to things you truly value. The issue with this…
Game designer Robin Hunicke has noted that Facebook is actually a complex, massively multiplayer online game, with challenges, rewards, and levels just like any other. Think about it for a second and you'll realize that the rules are simple: be the most fun, intelligent, witty, caring version of yourself. The benefits…
In an experiment at Cornell, stressed college students randomly assigned to scroll through their own Facebook profiles for five minutes experienced boosts in self-affirmation compared to students who looked at a stranger’s Facebook profile. The researchers believe self-affirmation comes from reminiscing on past…
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google have produced amazing products that have benefited the world enormously. But these companies are also caught in a zero-sum race for our finite attention, which they need to make money. Constantly forced to outperform their competitors, they must use increasingly persuasive…
irst, the “spotlight” of attention is how cognitive scientists tend to talk about perceptual attention. The things that are task-salient in my environment. How I select and interact with those, basically. Second, the “starlight.” If the spotlight is about doing things, the starlight is who I want to be, not just what…