[marginalium]
Social media is the new oral history
15 Nov 2024
Very interesting idea:
Social media basically brought us to something like an oral culture:
- We both archive everything and trust our collective memory – everything is saved, bookmarked, etc. but never revisited (when was the last time you bookmarked a website or even checked your own likes?)
- For information to be remembered it has to be recirculated, repeated, or go viral or we forget because time moves so fast (similar to storytelling?)
- You can’t look things up easily because we live in a perpetual now – if you don’t understand the context of the discourse, you need to ask someone to catch you up
- This also makes society very participatory
- This has weird knock-on effects like needing to always be online to know what’s going on in the world - you can’t just hermit away and study, at a minimum you’re lurking
Among other things. I wonder if this is some kind of loop closing on Postman’s amusing ourselves to death.
Anthologies: Gratification, Connection, Thought Architecture, Digital Architecture, Collective Architecture, On Culture, On Friendship, On Thinking and Reasoning, Accidental Civilisation