23 July

The medium is the message. It was social media severing our ties to our own social networks, which evolved over generations and included the institutions that operate our society, that unleashed perpetual rivalry and rage. Once you don’t have an established social network to moderate your thoughts and behaviours, everything becomes an increasingly violent battle for attention, in a global and anonymous space. Two very simple things caused this. The social media ‘feed’, vacuuming up the whole world and presenting it to you, completely decontextualised as a space of attention, where you then fight with others, for that attention. And the ability to comment inside other peoples’ networks that you have no real connection with. Which then becomes a fight for attention and status, in their space. Both the feed and universal comments are core tools of these platforms. Both strip-mine existing social networks, leaving just the decontextualised platforms.