How the Online Right Fell Apart
“Now we’re in an age where you can simply reinforce your own viewpoints. And it’s hard to have a discussion of the facts when you’re dealing with two separate sets of facts—two sets of talking points that came down from on high. With the Internet, all of us were going to be content producers, but it’s become an echo chamber.”
George Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
Something else happens in a world of superabundance, and an attention economy. Because you can’t find what you want, you start to dig yourself into very specific niches, and join sub-groups. Everyone atomizes into millions of groups connected by very specific interests. In more benign ways, it can be great – you find your fellow travelers, and I ca... See more
Ten (Big) Trends
Since the rise of Trumpists, Brexiteers, and populists around the world, huge resources have been poured into hiring tens of thousands of content moderators, writing machine-learning algorithms, passing laws, and building regulatory bureaucracies to rid the internet, if not the world, of lies and idiocy, fake news and disinformation. What a fool’s
... See moreJeff Jarvis • The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet
ours is an era of decline that has turned from the outward to the inward obsession with identity and “authenticity,” both personal and tribal, fueled by digital connectivity. Paradoxically, social media in this sense is anti-social, leading to the disintegration of community through a kind of connected isolation.