label

social media

Linked to 6 items

• from: Dušan Barok (chapter)

  Being in it for many years, of course, one can see how the environment and navigation changed — I would say that in the 2010s, people lived through the era of social media, which was more and more sucking attention. social mediaPeople would eventually stop clicking on those links and basically, we would just end up scrolling. This kind of silos would even prevent people from exiting it. It essentially shrinks the experience of the web to five or so websites, everything else being just invisible or sucked into these social media platforms. Today, it’s getting even worse with AI and how AI tools are transforming the logic of the search. In the past, we would use search engines by entering a few keywords, pushing enter and then getting results. Now we are pushed towards writing queries with a question mark at the end, this idea of a chatbot or talking to an entity and getting answers. To answer questions, AI vacuums the web and cuts the sources, without really pointing to the source of information.

• from: Kenneth Goldsmith (chapter)

  Kenneth 15:14 I’m Kenneth. I started (UbuWeb) [https://ubu.com/] in 1996 and things have changed a lot since then. Sometimes I find myself speaking like it’s 1998. I’m not comfortable with the developments that have happened in digital publishing or let’s just call it the digital world. social mediaI kind of feel like Instagram ate my utopia. I've kind of dropped out of radical publishing because I've become extraordinarily disillusioned with the turn that the web has taken since the advent of social media, truly the advent of Donald Trump, who ate social media as well.

• from: Kenneth Goldsmith (chapter)

  Kenneth 18:51 It was gradual, there were so many breaking points, but I really would pin it to Trump’s rise on social media, specifically, which at first was intriguing to see the way he misused the media. At that time, I was on Twitter, and the way he misused Twitter really was modernist inflected. Completely unconscious, Joyce-ian even. I mean, this guy’s never read Joyce, but he was doing something that was sort of brilliant. It was everything I’d always hoped that social media could be, even in its perversity. Then I just realized it was the complete opposite of my utopia, obviously politically. Then it got really confused and surveilled: social mediathe space of social media became a space of surveillance, not only by the tech companies, but more disturbingly by my neighbors and my fellow citizens. You can't make a move on social media without being surveilled. I also really do think that (Zuboff’s book)[https://profilebooks.com/work/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/] really opened my eyes to my naivety. I just realized at a certain point that I got everything wrong. So much of my theorizing was just completely wrong. I missed so much. I was so enthusiastic and, in the 90s, the web was just such a beautiful utopia. It was the world as I really wanted it to be, and it came crashing down. It was crash right around probably 2013, 2014, you know, during Trump’s rise.

• from: Kenneth Goldsmith (chapter)

  Kenneth [[00:22:32]] social mediaWell, social media just ate everything. I don't think anybody goes to UbuWeb anymore. They don't leave Instagram. Everybody's corralled on an app. Apps are just corralling devices that keep you within the confines of where they want you. My sense is that most people really don't use the Web anymore. They feel that they have everything they need on social media. Streaming companies, media companies, social media companies have entrapped people. So the notion of the open Web, it still exists. Nobody’s stopping me. And all these notions of an undemocratic Web never actually really came to fruition because actually everybody just stopped using the Web. And they managed to just control and capitalize and tame the Web the way that they always wanted to.

• from: Kenneth Goldsmith (chapter)

  Kenneth 24:10 Yeah, there’s this term that came up and I really hate it. It’s called Creator, because creators create for a platform, specifically catering to that, to monetize or to capitalize. It’s concordant with whatever oppressive system happens to be in place that they are playing to. They’re playing to a system completely uncritically, because they call themselves a creator. Whereas I had to really think about the difference between a creator and an artist. You could say that many artists are creators for the art world. Many poets are creators for the poetry industry, but that was never interesting to me. The interesting idea of an artist was somebody who went against whatever prevailing system there was as an act of resistance, as an act of real uncreativity or slash creativity. My critique on creativity was always that creativity was concordant in the way the creator is concordant. If I was to go back to uncreativity today, I would have something really equally stupid to say about creators as I did about creativity to write “creator”, “creativity”. These are terms I can’t stand. social mediaHow do we get out of this sort of "create", "creative", "creator" space? It's useless because it's monetized. Most artistic production isn't monetized. So, it's stupid and it's usurped. It's taken all of the energy out of radical forms of publishing, practice, and thinking. So it’s just not interesting to me. I get it, but it’s actually sucked all the air out of the room.

• from: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

  alternative publishing practicesI create lower-pressure publishing experiences, first publishing in a private space, then maybe publishing it publicly later. It is interesting to think about that relationship where there's a group of people in a private channel who are choosing to express themselves publicly. You are trying to shape some external opinion. Part of the power that I found releasing this limited-edition zip file, or even setting the initial run of copies of this book, social mediaThe Dark Forest Book, at 777 editions, is that the internet encourages us to seek infinite audience and to imagine the entire billion people could like me today if I just wrote the right words. It could be me. It encourages us to think that way, which encourages us to think in a way which is kind of disempowering, because we're almost always going to be disappointed and we're going to lose our voice. But instead flip that and say alternative publishing practiceswhat is the maximum number of people it would be meaningful to reach? And when that number is something more like 50 or a hundred or two hundred, what in the past might make us feel bashful, I think it could be an asset. It can say: “well, this is special and to own it means something.” It means to participate. There’s an opportunity to more positively frame and build relationships around the limited nature of a lot of small run media. I found that an interesting way to try to control the way the internet pulls us in ways that are unhelpful.