[medialist.]

Here’s the thing about Twitter. You don’t need to be logged into Twitter to see these tweets. You can see them on Twitter logged out. Or you can see them embedded in other places on web and mobile or on TV and elsewhere. You only need to be logged into Twitter to tweet. So anyone who is focusing on the logged in monthly active user number is missing something bigger. Twitter is where people who have something to say go to say it. And right now we are witnessing Twitter being used for what is arguably the biggest thing out there. A run for President of the United States. That is the contradiction of Twitter.

oh man! honestly, we’d never want to do that! v, v, v sorry that our pepe joke contribution obliterated your enjoyment of a meme*

We've Moved Into A Post-Literate Communication Era

shevathegun:

There are tumblr bloggers who obfuscate their communication by hiding entire posts in tags. My colleague, Molly Templeton introduced me to what she calls “delete culture”—the act of removing social media posts from the Internet that are no longer relevant to the exact moment you are in. She’s shown me Instagram users who limit their accounts to a carefully curated collection of nine photographs that fit in the above-the-scroll grid. We’ve seen super-long Twitter conversations disappear the moment a TV show’s credits roll. This is not the way “users” are supposed to behave. You cannot data mine deletion. This is the opposite of permanence. And this is beautiful. I think there’s a lot to learn from these behaviors that are less about meeting consumer needs and more about respecting the human desire to be understood.

Aside from issues of life and death, there is no more urgent task for American intellectuals and writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology in individual and collective life. All revolutions exaggerate, and the digital revolution is no different. We are still in the middle of the great transformation, but it is not too early to begin to expose the exaggerations, and to sort out the continuities from the discontinuities. The burden of proof falls on the revolutionaries, and their success in the marketplace is not sufficient proof. Presumptions of obsolescence, which are often nothing more than the marketing techniques of corporate behemoths, need to be scrupulously examined. By now we are familiar enough with the magnitude of the changes in all the spheres of our existence to move beyond the futuristic rhapsodies that characterize much of the literature on the subject. We can no longer roll over and celebrate and shop. Every phone in every pocket contains a “picture of ourselves,” and we must ascertain what that picture is and whether we should wish to resist it. Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.

Now the Internet is centralizing, bringing with it Mass Net Fame. The top 100 sites are almost entirely commercial, with many of the old media well-represented there. Much of Net culture is driven by the old forces of mass media shoveling the Same Old Crap down our waiting maws. Sites like Facebook filter our feeds, leading to the snowballing of works from commercial entities. (Note that this anti-democratizing of our culture is proportional not to the size of the site but to the degree of algorithmic filtering they do.)

AgingBooth lets you make such images at any increment you select, not just 25 years; you can save those files and then do as you will with them. This means that you can make a portrait of yourself as you may have evolved by 2050—and then, using the above-mentioned Vintage Scene (which can make your photos look as if they were taken in different eras, going all the way back to the birth of photography), you can see how you’d have appeared as an octogenarian in 1850. Analog photography as we knew it in its first 150 years allowed skilled practitioners to blend fact and fiction. Digital imaging gives those powers to the most amateur picture-maker. As a result, photography’s service as a vehicle for fantasy now stands alongside its function as a recording system and may supersede it. We have just begun to adjust our cultural assumptions about the photograph to keep up.

It’s useful here to recall social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson’s critique of digital dualism. Namely, cyperspace is not some separate or tacked-on reality to meatspace — we live fully enmeshed, augmented on-and-offline lives. And as much as concrete cities are home to malice and murder, so are online communities. Whether or not 4Chan deserves censure for enabling the proliferation of horrific content belongs to debate that also predates the internet — how much evidence of human brutality, especially when visually graphic, should be available for public consumption?

failure to acknowledge a lack of diversity suggests that, once again, the driving force behind social networking does not reflect the complicated workings of hierarchy, power, and vulnerability that shape the very social space a site like Ello aims to mirror and mediate. “They are creating a social product with a political manifesto, without good knowledge of the social,” Jurgenson said. “The lack of diversity also applies to expertise — social media creators tend to all come from the same background and the same professional spheres.”

We have lost phone conversations, because talking on cell phones is no fun at all, and it’s harder than texting or typing. I do think we’ve lost that, but we’ve gained a lot with the internet. I feel like the internet has turned us all into letter writers. I think of my mother when I was a kid, she never wrote down anything but a grocery list. People didn’t write, because you’d call. Why would you write anything? But now we’re all writers. So when people complain about grammar and punctuation, I think it isn’t that our grammar and punctuation have gotten worse, but that it used to be that only writers wrote. Only people who were in education wrote, but now we all write: we all text, we all post. I feel like we’ve lost phones but we’ve gained this whole different type of correspondence that hasn’t existed since the age of letter writing.

Virality isn’t a function of content. It’s a function of the network in which the content is placed.