internet
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Nothing is random
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1 min read
Discoverability will forever be twisted in the maw of internet algorithms. Nothing is ever truly random. We are data’s significant other with a bullseye on our back. Facebook has been triangulating our data for years, matching our likes with the highest bidder. Designers, copy-writers, and marketers work together to create internet ads that strangle our…
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Discoveries are meant to be shared
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2 min read
One of the best things about finding something first (a piece of music, a new fashion style, an important article) is the feeling that you own it. Nobody else knows about it (at least from what you’ve seen) which means you can share it and get credit for it as the source. The Internet is…
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Everything is sampled, including our DNA
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1 min read
It’s in our DNA to sample, to take existing slices from each other to build something new. The internet is the largest cut and paste machine. A producer of novelty, it begs for recombinations, a collection of stuff we can remix and make our own. Like a Tumblr page, we decorate our personalities with originality.…
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A medium and its message
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2 min read
The medium is the format in which something works. The selection of media predetermines how content gets disseminated and shared. The Internet is a mass medium. Newspapers are a medium. TV, radio, podcasts, and books are also mediums. A medium is any messaging mechanism that connects people together to help facilitate communication. The medium is…
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Faulty attention
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1 min read
We cultivate boredom the same way we incubate attention, that is, we latch on to things until we no longer see them. They camouflage into our awareness. The internet user runs into the cornucopia of visuals on Instagram. Liking becomes desultory, numb to the perpetual sting of dopamine. Are we not entertained? We are sloppy internet…
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Half bots, half real people
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1 min read
The internet is half bots, half real people. It makes you question whether humans are even evolving or code is the only advancer. Take a scan of Twitter and you’ll hardly notice a difference between man and machine. They both spew the same self-confirming garbage. But even the bots are more random now — arbitrariness…
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This is what happens when you reply to spam email
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1 min read
For three years, writer and comedian James Veitch answered spam email. “All I’m doing is wasting their time. I think any time they’re spending with me, is time they’re not spending scamming vulnerable adults of out their savings.” In a hilarious TED Talk, he details his thread with one spammer who contacted him about a business…
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Soon enough the good old days of shoddy airplane wifi will be behind us. The airplane seems to be the only place — the antithesis of the coffee shop — where we have no choice but to disconnect. The internet is either too expensive or too slow to bother using. And it’s within this big…
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‘The internet’s ownership of words’
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2 min read
The internet owns our words. Anyone can pull up an old Tweet or Facebook post and show you ‘this is what you said.’ The internet makes permanent the written word. But such posts are usually “naked and without context.” Words get lost in time It’s not that people don’t look at the time stamp; it’s…