John Battelle's Search Blog Marketers Have Given Up on Context, And Our National Discourse Is Suffering

Unfortunately, advertising has been ingrained into the internet as the basic model for so long and to such an extent that it’s hard to envision online life without the systematic manipulation of attention and all its evils. So we’re bound to wind up here, at the bitter end of “content.” Which is a good excuse to withdraw deeper into books, movies,

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Opportunistic bad actors — anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers,conspiracy theorists, misogynists, racists, xenophobes, trolls, partisan extremists, scammers, and pedophiles — have taken advantage. Facebook and YouTube continually tweak their algorithms, use machine learning to detect spam and abuse, and spend billions of dollars hiring tens of thousands of... See more

Innovating within an existing platform is always a challenge, because as media theorist Marshall McLuhan argued decades ago, ‘the medium is the message’. TikTok and Twitter/X have short-form content built into the design of the platform, which prevents depth. As I explore in The Bigger Picture, this also leads to what philosopher C. Thi Nguyen call... See more

Why are we seeing a global homogenizing of culture across every dimension that counts? Why has Hollywood become so creatively bankrupt that nobody bothers watching that oh-so-predictable-52nd sequel to a superhero movie? Why have pop songs become so objectively similar? Why is everyone following the same formula for their posts on Instagram and hum... See more