Social Media – Excerpted

“…some magical place where a total lack of any discernible talent or intelligence or interpersonal skills had never interfered with anyone’s success”

12 April 2019 Drew KaplanYouTube

When it finally sunk in that I’m not the next Nabokov, I got pretty depressed for a while. I started to wish that there was some magical place where a total lack of any discernible[…]

“Pettiness often manifests itself as an outsize form of revenge — responding to mild slights by putting an absurd amount of energy into plotting meaningless reprisals”

15 April 201812 April 2018 Drew KaplanInternet

Pettiness often manifests itself as an outsize form of revenge — responding to mild slights by putting an absurd amount of energy into plotting meaningless reprisals. (One theory even claims this is how Donald Trump[…]

“If you feel that these media influence and inform public opinion – and swing elections! – then abandoning Facebook and deleting your account may actually be civically irresponsible”

9 April 20188 April 2018 Drew KaplanFacebook

1. FB promised to be and, in many ways, has become a new public square. It was never private. The insistence that it was private and that our privacy has been violated leads people to[…]

“Our present panics tend to arrive just as new parts of our economy, culture and politics are reconstituted within platform marketplaces”

25 February 2018 Drew KaplanBusiness

The internet of the 1990s was a perfect canvas for alarmism: hard to define, easy to misunderstand, growing rapidly but not yet vital or even familiar to those most inclined to worry about it. But[…]

Considering vertical vs horizontal perspectives

11 September 2017 Drew KaplanInternet

Before 1930, moving picture aspect ratios were all over the place. But mass distribution requires standardization, so influential filmmakers met in Hollywood that year to talk. They settled on the horizontal shot. Things pretty much[…]

“Social platforms tend to refer to their customers in euphemistic, almost democratic terms…”

8 September 20176 September 2017 Drew KaplanFacebook

Social platforms tend to refer to their customers in euphemistic, almost democratic terms: as “users” or “members of a community”. Their leaders are prone to statesmanlike posturing, and some, like Mark Zuckerberg, even seem to[…]