Sublime
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(My 93-year-old mother has kept her subscription to the Washington Post strictly because she loves the crossword puzzles. I have shown her websites teeming with crossword puzzles, but she remains unmoved. My mother wants her bundle, and belongs to the last generation to do so.) Information sought a less grandiose, less industrial level of circulati
... See moreMartin Gurri • Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. In a comment to Vox that recalls the first post-Babel diaspora, he said: " The ... See more
The Atlantic • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
In short, with democratized access, the web became more saturated than ever before, and as consumers, we began to spend more and more time trying to sort through it all. In a state of analysis paralysis, how do we disaggregate signal from noise?
Gaby Goldberg • Curators All the Way Down
The Post-Individual by Yancey Strickler
LinkIn the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential election, these attitudes radically shifted. For different reasons, both sides of the political spectrum began to immensely distrust the platform monopolies. The algorithmically curated streams that had once seemed so futuristic suddenly became Orwellian. Today, it’s not only acceptable to move more of your... See more
Cal Newport • The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class
In a work featured in this section, American artist Joshua Citarella trawls the message boards of 4chan, Reddit, and other such platforms, collecting designs for flags that express young people’s political self-identifications. The designs he has collected combine wildly opposing discursive systems in a sort of schizophrenic mélange: “Islamic, fasc... See more
NADIM SAMMAN
While this shift has lowered many cultural barriers to entry, since anyone can make their work public online, it has also resulted in a kind of tyranny of real-time data.
Kyle Chayka • Filterworld
this remains one of my favorite pieces of internet cultural criticism https://t.co/722WCUehm6
We now live in a digital age, in which information becomes fluid and variable. All that was solid has melted into air. In the print world, getting your facts right was about competence and care; now what the facts are depends on what date you access a website, or which website you visit. The nature of information has changed irreversibly.