Source: AFP
As leaks of internal reports from Facebook and Instagram in recent months have ma
The Medium is the Message
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Today’s reminder of why we are better off deleting all social media. It’s fast, it’s easy, and I don’t miss any of it!
Rusty
But that’s really the idea isn’t it? People want their views the way they want them. We live in a world where processed realities are consumed for convenience just as processed foods are.
The lunatic fringe are the ones trying to sort thru the B.S. and get to substance.
When everything becomes commodity then what sells is what gets sold.
And "“We the People” are being sold constantly and it comes from all directions. Especially via light emitting rectangles of all sizes,
Rusty,
Right on. Write on.
We can not escape the tyranny of language.
In the words of George Carlin:
“Language is just a tool used to conceal the truth”.
Marshall McLuhan: On politicians and voters 50 years ago.
“What ever the sentiments they express most people will vote on the images they perceive”.
“The medium is the massage,” controlled by the owners of the medium.
Jim Handshaw
Thanks for joining us here, Michael. I have more or less done the same, although their influence on our world and people we have relationships with cannot be avoided.
Hah! I think you’re mostly right, although that would mean (probably correctly) that we are all the lunatic fringe. Still, I think that even we lunatics can get a bit too comfortable consuming content uncritically from time to time. I know I do. I benefit from having a kind of tick in my head about some of these things to remind me to back away when my engagement is being nudged.
I’m going to tell you a secret, but you have to keep it to yourself.
You ready?
Twitter exists for journos, and nobody else. Twitter the company knows this. Twitter the developers know this. The only one who didn’t seem to know this was Jack Dorsey. Nobody on the planet has less understood their product than Dorsey.
The entire point of Twitter–back in the golden era–was that you, a peasant, could interact with the celebrities and the special people. Now that very interaction has been stifled, with features like closing or deleting comments, all done at the behest of journalists and activists (but I repeat myself). Journos hate that the commoners can shout back at (and often times fact check) the gentry. Twitter’s latest rules about privacy and posting media–audio, video, or images–of non-public figures is a direct attack on the kind of citizen journalism that has grown on its platform. The carveout for Journalists
will allow them to continue their activities while the rules will merely be for lowercase j journalists.
For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.
A historic precedent might be the transatlantic cable, Although it carried many messages the ones that mattered were the US$/GBP swap rate. So much so that the currency pair become known as The Cable.
Information received from twitter is already known as tweets. Is there a tweet/useful info ratio, possibly in percent?
A vernacular usage could perhaps be: That tweet has a UI rate of 13%.
Almost completely arbitrary and not under the control of the platform itself, but set by the information market consumers, at various degrees of abstraction.
Definitely a logarithmic loss function, and both the cable and radio are comparables.
Important thing is, I think, to think of social media as another layer of transmission removed from the internet as a medium, in the same way that cable news is another layer of transmission removed from “TV” as a medium.
Here’s an idea: Don’t look at social media.
Bottom line: we get the narratives (and government) we deserve.
Seems to my lay person mind that written word and spoken word go to different parts of the brain to be processed and spoken word processing had quite a bit more time to evolve. The transmission methods that incorporate a restriction on characters are new and again, lay person pondering here, our brains are trying to figure out processing of this new type of input and it may be these methods of transmissions are landing in a gray area.
Douglas Adams had a fun take on this.
Always bring your towel and thanks for all the fish!