Are You Under the Influence? The Tail That Wags The Dog - Dhole Moments

I Outsourced My Emotions to a Digital Avatar. You Should Too.

I turned 30 this past year, and like many Americans who are finally ready to grow up, I created a tiny little version of myself. Ever since she came...

Your Body, Your Feed – Creating a bridge between consent and self-expression - What’s Happening on My Feed?

Recently, we’ve seen an increase in discussion around how adult content currently shows up on our platform. By adult content, we mean content that is usually labeled as pornography, non-sexual nudity, or sexually suggestive content. Labeling adult content (both text- and image-based) is an example of how we empower community members to share more of themselves with folks, without creating a non-consensual experience for other members that do not wish to engage with adult content.  To solve this, we want to present you with options and invite you, as a member of our community, to decide how adult content shows up on Blacksky.

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.

Marc Andreessen as Avatar for Societal Decay

How one venture capitalist represents everything wrong with social media

The Nightmare of Eternal Spring: Why Social Media Can't Survive on "Niceness" Alone - Nightflight

Choosing to Stay Human

If you go to your favorite social media site, you will find it full of posts that start to look suspiciously similar to each other:

Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore

The social-media Web as we knew it, a place where we consumed the posts of our fellow-humans and posted in return, appears to be over.

How The Enshittification Of Social Media Is Decreasing The Switching Costs And Enabling Something New

In the last few weeks I’ve written about how Elon Musk’s “changes” to how Twitter is running have done an amazing job convincing people to join Mastodon. And I’ve also…

Designing the Social

This book explores the complex place of social media in young people’s lives and the role it plays in shaping how they understand and present their identity publicly on a wide array of platforms. It proposes a new theoretical framework, Comic Theory, for understanding identity performances.

Designing the Social

This book explores the complex place of social media in young people’s lives and the role it plays in shaping how they understand and present their identity publicly on a wide array of platforms. It proposes a new theoretical framework, Comic Theory, for understanding identity performances.

How social media is fueling an intense form of romantic obsession

The digital world is primed to fuel episodes of profound infatuation known as limerence.

The story of the internet, as told by Know Your Meme

Ten years of documenting memes will teach you more than you’d ever want to know about people, truth, beauty, death, and “tits or gtfo“

Custodians of the Internet

A revealing and gripping investigation into how social media platforms police what we post online—and the large societal impact of these decisions Most use...