WHY SOCIAL MEDIA IS DYING

by Brett Stevens

Over the past few months, it has become apparent that social media and real life are increasingly diverging. The proof of this is that people in real life — a wide range of classes, backgrounds and outlooks, but generally effective people and not mouth-breathing attendees to the civilization process — are interested in the stuff that social media ignores, and vice-versa.

ANDROID EXISTENCE

"In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet."

by Daniel Spaulding

In his classic, prophetic novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, American science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick depicted a future dystopia where the only way to determine the difference between humans and rogue, bio-engineered androids was empathy: the latter were incapable of experiencing and thus demonstrating it.

SOCIAL MEDIA: FREAKSHOW FOR THE ANTISOCIAL

by Colin Liddell

The internet has revolutionized the media of the West, and – because "the medium is the message" – it has also radically skewed our culture in new and unexpected directions. Before its advent the media was much more centralized. As a result, it tended to favour a corporatist approach along with small ‘c’ conservative values.

But now things have changed. Social media has become the driving engine of the "new media" and a major determinant of the news and opinion agenda. Those sites and publications that have adjusted themselves to this new clickbait reality are burgeoning. The rest are withering.

But has anyone besides Facebook (!) stopped to think about this in a systemic way? The old, centralized media naturally favoured the message of its paymasters and tended to project their values, but how about the new decentralized media with its powerful social media component? How does that work?