“The real significance of a new medium isn’t in how already-famous people use it or how businesses use it”

The real significance of a new medium isn’t in how already-famous people use it or how businesses use it. It’s in the mundane uses. You’d think we’d have learned this lesson by now. When a new form of communication suddenly becomes cheap and easy, people don’t merely copy the stuff on TV and in Hollywood. They do new things. Weird things, too, which violate a previous ideas about aesthetics and utility.

Clive Thompson, “Fridgewatching”, Wired (June 2015), 54.