This week: why the collapse of print media is contagious; some stuff invented for space; and Pablo Escobar’s drug hippos.
Q&A: Robin Berjon on freeing journalists' feeds.
The AT protocol and “long-term, lifelong, sustainable protection against enshittification.”
Brett Scott (@brettscott)
Marshall McLuhan is famous for his observation that the form of a communication technology can shape our mind and society The age of the printed book, for example, carried with it a particular way of being. Regardless of the differing content of different books, all books required a particular mindset in which a thread is followed from the beginning to the end through an arc I feel the age of social media is like the age of a ripped up book, as if we were surrounded by torn shards and shreds of paper floating like confetti around us. We grab for them, hoping for some tiny insight, but not having any way of knowing where it fits in the overarching narrative This note is one such shard. You can toss it away now
Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media
When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms and protocols that allowed people to socialize with friends and communities of interest by using digital technologies. Twenty years later, users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated. In this essay, I argue that the very essence of social media has changed. To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” Doing so raises new questions about digitally mediated sociality, not to mention the politics and governance of these platforms.
Publishing is fucked. The ATmosphere could save it. | Paul Stephenson | Offprint
Building a future for publishing that keeps authors and readers at its heart.
Cory Doctorow at CF 25: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It
The Rise of the Ray-Ban Meta Creep
Between pickup artists and juvenile pranksters, the wearable device is becoming associated with pests of all kinds.
Meta's Ray-Ban Glasses Users Film and Harass Massage Parlor Workers
“The shameless use of covert recording technology at massage parlours to gain likes, attention, and online notoriety is both disgusting and dangerous.”
No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior
Electronic media present us with a collage of experiences from everyplace. We eat dinner at home while watching starving children thousands of miles away reach out to us for food. From our easy chairs, we stare at blindfolded hostages, and coolly
Fundación Mutante - GFMD
Fundación Mutante is the first digital movement of citizen conversation in Colombia. Fundación Muitante calls on our audience to speak, understand and act on the most urgent problems of our time. Through an innovative multichannel digital communication strategy, Mutante invites audiences to actively discuss their issues, building a public agenda from the bottom up, from […]
Curate your own newspaper with RSS
Escape newsletter inbox chaos and algorithmic surveillance by building your own enshittification-proof newspaper from the writers you already read
The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
Why the dark forests of the internet — podcasts, newsletters, and other private channels — are growing, and why might that pose a problem
#769: Nothing you see online is true
Clipping as emergent online literacy, the women self-injecting bootleg Botox and the woes of Facebook nanny groups
Big Tech tried to get young people addicted. Now we’re fighting back
Two seismic court decisions in the US have intervened where legislators have failed to defend social media users from exploitation, writes campaigner Zamaan Qureshi
Sources on social media: Information context collapse and volume of content as predictors of source blindness - George Pearson, 2021
Although social media has become a primary news platform, the effects of social media features on users’ information processing remains under-explored. This stu...
🧵 On social media, we feel trapped in “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers.” Often, we see this as a problem with the algorithm. Our new essay argues the problem is the feed interface itself: it constrains our movement—all we can do is scroll. We lay out an alternative vision:
From Feeds to Trails
leaflet.pub