From Common Sense to Bespoke Realities

This is an observation about human rationality as much as it is about the epistemic conditions generated by life in what Jay Bolter has aptly termed the digital plentitude and which I usually call the Database. We are not as narrowly rational in our thinking as many would like to believe. Which is why conventional “solutions” to the problems associ... See more

Now you look 10, 15 years later, and the content moderation debates aren’t about should you have nipples or not in videos and nudity or things like that — it’s about truthiness. It’s about what happens when everybody is allowed to upload content that essentially shows their version of reality versus a consensus version of reality.

That passive mass audience on which so many political and economic institutions depended had itself unbundled, disaggregated, fragmented into what I call vital communities: groups of wildly disparate size gathered organically around a shared interest or theme.

There is a war going on in our current information ecosystem. It is a war of propaganda, emotional manipulation, blatant or unconscious lies. It is nothing new, but is reaching a new intensity as our technology evolves. The result is that it has become harder and harder to make sense of the world, with potentially fatal consequences. If we can’t ma... See more