We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad, deep in its very structure. All we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.
According to Ian Bogost from The Atlantic The Age of Social Media Is Ending. Yes, please!
theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/twitter-facebook-social-media-decline/672074
At this point, you could even say that the point of the theory is so obvious, it’s cliché—people talk about longing for the days of weird web design and personal sites and listservs all the time. Even Facebook employees say they miss the “old” internet.
Never heard of the “dead-internet theory” before, but as a lover of the “old” internet, I kind of get how this pretty far-out-there idea got its followers. At least it’s an entertaining, relatively little-threatening conspiracy theory.
theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-internet-theory-wrong-but-feels-true/619937/
There are no rules to blogging except this one: always self-host your website because your URL, your own private domain, is the most valuable thing you can own. Your career will thank you for it later and no-one can take it away.
I second everything addressed in this short plea for blogging (on your own domain) published by Robin –of course– on his personal blog; Take Care of Your Blog.
I’m a hyperlink maximalist: everything should be a hyperlink, including everything that is hyperlinked by the author, everything that isn’t hyperlinked by the author, and the hyperlinks themselves. Words should be hyperlinked, but so should be every interesting phrase, quote, name, proper noun, paragraph, document, and collection of documents I read.
An interesting thought experiment (or concept idea?) by software engineer Linus about hyperlinks, the backbone of the independent web, published on his wonderful micro-blog.
Not long ago, it was the job of human brains. But brains required more: An original idea, a twist, a punchline, a strategy, a journey, a hero. The program humans previously ran on – powered by emotion and imagination and taste and individuality – is now antiquated, rendered obsolete by The Algorithm.
This article about social media and The slow creep of mediocrity by fellow designer Tobias Van Schneider reminds me of an interview with Bo Burnham –I, unfortunately, can’t find anymore– in which he talked about how social media and the high-speed culture of today prevents people from crafting complex art and following through with long-lasting projects. This is very much in line with the initial sentiment this blog is based upon.
© Vox (via YouTube)
Beginning in January 2021, advances in AI research have produced a plethora of deep-learning models capable of generating original images from simple text prompts, effectively extending the human imagination. Researchers at OpenAI, Google, Facebook, and others have developed text-to-image tools that they have not yet released to the public, and similar models have proliferated online in the open-source arena and at smaller companies like Midjourney.
Vox not only does share this interesting video on how AI is able to create imagery based on a short descriptional text —and some of the implications this technology has, but they also include a list of current free AI Art tools in the video description for anyone willing to dive deeper;
A friend gave me design advice once. He said to start with left-aligned black text on a white background, and to apply styling only to solve a specific problem. This is good advice. Embrace this, and you embrace Brutalist Web Design. Focus on your content and your visitors will enjoy you and your website. Focus on decoration or tricking your visitors into clicking ads, and your content will suffer, along with your visitors.
Some ideas David Bryant Copeland proposes in his Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design might sound a tad radical, but I do like the general concept, so I’m tempted to follow along.
Self-publishing on the internet is a rewarding and powerful experience – you can very quickly produce work that is accessible to billions of people for very low cost.
Building websites is often seen as an uncreative, mathematics-based task undertaken by coders. This library encourages you to learn how to design and build interactive experiences and to consider this a tool in your design toolkit.
If you want to publish something online for the first time, this website is a great starting point. As a matter of fact, even if you’ve been building websites for a while already you might discover one or the other nugget –like the already linked idea of Web Design as Architecture– to pick up.
© Polyphonic (via YouTube)
It’s absolutely mind-boggling to me that ‘Inside’ by Bo Burnham was released almost a year ago. But the dwindling of time asides;
After seeing the Special multiple times since its release and listening to the songs separately even more often, I still consider it to be one of the most notable pieces of art published in years. Not only is it an accurate reflection of the pandemic reality and the feelings probably most of us had or have to face as a consequence, but beyond that, I consider it to be one of the most spot-on dissections of (current) internet culture the entertainment industry has to offer.
As I have learned through the recently released video essay Bo Burnham, Arcade Fire, and the Infinite Dread of the Internet by Polyphonic, Arcade Fire –who have returned not long ago with a new single from their upcoming album WE, (tbr. in May)– have been criticizing the development plaguing the world wide web years ago, as well. Guess it’s time to give their albums ‘Reflector’ (2013) and ‘Everything Now’ (2017) a more considerate listening (again).
Made to Measure is an experiment that asks if you can reconstruct a person based solely on their digital data trail. Can you build a doppelganger of a person you don’t even know? Record, recreate, and replay the life of someone and their personality in detail?
[…]
Take an hour of your time and join us in the world of digital trails. How close will we get to the person behind the data?
How much does five years’ worth of personal Google data consisting of more than 100 000 data points reveal about the life of a person?
Using the online data¹ from an anonymous volunteer, the Laokoon group worked together with data analysts to reconstruct this person based solely on their digital trail. The result of the experiment is shown in an intriguing documentary called Made to Measure which is available through the dedicated project website —alongside different media libraries.
¹ the data Google is legally required to release according to EU laws
The Internet has been monetised by social media, by big tech, by search engines. Fuck, it’s been monetised by pretty much everyone. The whole concept of netizens and a community around the web, from the late 90s and early 00s, have been lost to the sands of time.
As made clear before, I think the world wide web –or at least social media, which unfortunately replaces the real web for way too many people now– is in a bad state this day and age. Or, to put it in the flowery language of Kev Quirk; The Web Is Fucked.
Don’t worry, there’s some positivity within his “manifesto”, too.
In the unlikely case, that you missed the current furor;
The Facebook Files and the insights shared by Frances Haugen made it clear once again how ruth- and wreckless –at best naive– Facebook (now Meta) operates and how well researched the negative ramifications of the social network internally really are.
Probably a good occasion to bring up Mike Monteiro’s talks from 2013 respectively 2018 again, addressing us, the people within the industry: ‘How Designers Destroyed the World’ (vimeo.com/68470326) and ‘How to Build an Atomic Bomb’ (vimeo.com/268704084).
The most influential companies in the world put all their energy into getting us to click, react, and consume. If you work on a computer, procrastination awaits you everywhere, all the time. How do you beat it and get things done?
A well-written, practical guide from one of my favourite studios, Swiss-Japanese iA Inc., to help End Procrastination —just in time for the upcoming new workweek.
Minus is a finite social network where you get 100 posts—for life. While you can reply to a post as often as you like, every time you add to the feed, it subtracts from your lifetime total. When you reach 0 posts left, that’s it. No exceptions.
As mentioned in one of my first posts and repeatedly brought up since then, I think social media is fundamentally flawed in this day and age, a sentiment Ben Grosser certainly would agree upon.
In his work, the artist focuses on the cultural, social, and political effects of software and his latest project, Minus, is his take on a social network. It shares some aspects with traditional social media websites –like a main timeline and personal user profiles, but every user can publish only one hundred postings in total.
You can read more about the fascinating project on the artist’s website or join the network yourself —something I wouldn’t recommend for any other social network.