via Politico

Nicholas Carr is the author of “The Shallows” and “The Glass Cage,” among other books. He teaches at Williams College.

“When shunted through digital media, information behaves like water: It flows together, it melds and it finds its lowest common level. The trivial blurs with the profound, the false with the true. The news bulletin and the dance meme travel in the same stream, with the same weight”

As traditional distinctions between different forms of information dissolve, not only does politics become a form of entertainment, but entertainment becomes a form of politics.

Nicholas Carr

“Our choices about what we watch, read and listen to, on display through our online profiles and posts, become statements about ourselves and our beliefs, signifiers of our tribal allegiance.

Fed into the sorting algorithms of companies like Meta, Google and Twitter, our past choices also become the template for the information we receive in the future. Each of us gets locked into our own self-defining feedback loop. Bias gets amplified, context gets lost.

Barring an epochal change of heart or habit on the part of the public, the flow of information will only get faster and more discordant in the years ahead. Even if the current hype about the so-called metaverse never pans out, the technologies of augmented and virtual reality will advance quickly. The information-dispensing screen, or hologram, will always be in view.

The founding of POLITICO was not the most fateful media event that took place fifteen years ago, in January 2007. That was also the month that Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, a device that would come to make media a constant presence in people’s lives. Fifteen years from now, in January 2037, media will be even more inescapable. It will have become a permanent, seamless overlay on reality, a warped window through which we see the world….” READ ON

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