Category: Social Media

  • Wendy’s, Google, and Instagram

    Three times the media missed important context in the last week. I read a lot of High Quality News and avoid the Low Quality variety (see the helpful way that Ad Fontes Media defines these categories). Even topflight news can be so focused on short term events that they forget to ask context questions, by which I…

  • Elon’s Just Zis Guy, Y’know?

    What the chattering classes missed about Musk’s very busy two weeks in November. (Image created by Ideogram.ai.) There’s a recurring segment on Sesame Street called “three of these kids belong together” where the viewer’s job is to identify a fourth kid playing a different sport, not getting rained on, etc. Let’s play that game with a slice…

  • Let’s Stop Calling it “Social” Media

    Calling Facebook, Twitter/X, TikTok and the rest “social media” downplays the negative aspects of those services and platforms. What’s the alternative? Image created by ChatGPT. We already know that words have power. We know that non Black people who use “the N word” are proclaiming themselves as racists. Decades ago, the LGBTQ+ community reclaimed “queer”…

  • Analog Power-Ups and Relationship Half Lives

    Without interaction, human relationships wither, but some interactions are more powerful than others. I don’t remember what prompted the question, but about a month ago I posted this on Facebook: “Hive Mind: Is there a word for a quip that comes to you far too late but that—if you’d thought of it at the time—would…

  • The Real Social Media

    The algorithmic rabbit holes of Facebook, Instagram, and Snap can isolate us, but could we use both today’s and tomorrow’s digital technologies to connect In Real Life (IRL)? Both in its etymology and our common practice “social media” is oxymoronic, like “jumbo shrimp.” The Latin root socius means ally (or similar words like comrade) and is a shared…

  • My 2023 Prediction… or Prayer

    Many thinkers end each year with a cluster of predictions for the next year. I have just one—and it’s more of a prayer than a prediction—about trust. The pressing question of our age isn’t new. The Marx Brothers asked it in Duck Soup (1933): “who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” In a recent Los Angeles…

  • What Happens When Companies Become Partisan?

    Elon Musk’s right-wing posts on Twitter have plummeted the stock at Tesla, the public company where Musk is CEO. I discuss this with Lana McGilvray of Purpose and Peter Horan of Horan MediaTech. Background: On Tuesday, December 13, Peter shared this article from Inside EVs about recent research from YouGov and Morning Consult, each arguing that Tesla is now…

  • The End of Cheap Scale?

    More important than who owns Twitter is whether anybody can create a massive new social networking service. Also, what would a non-profit version of Twitter—let’s call it Quack—look like? As I wrote last time, I’m taking a break from the endless hand-wringing around Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. The more interesting question is whether anybody can do anything to…

  • Social Media and the Banality of Evil

    Max Fisher’s new book “The Chaos Machine” shows the downside of what happens when companies pursue growth at all costs. In her 1963 book about the trial of Adolph Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Nazi murder of six million Jews during the Second World War, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality…

  • Why Musk is Stalling

    Elon Musk seems to have accepted that he will have to do what he promised and acquire Twitter, but now he is delaying the close of the deal. He has a good reason, but it’s not the one you think. The late Steve Jobs was so persuasive that people said he had a “reality distortion…