marginalium noun

the notes one makes in the margins.

A short note on

social media is the new oral history

November 15, 2024

source: x.com

by Dorian Minors

I did brain science at Cambridge. Now I'm a behaviour science professor. Read my shit.

Very interesting idea:

Social media basically brought us to something like an oral culture:

  • We both archive everything and trust our collective memory – everything is saved, bookmarked, etc. but never revisited (when was the last time you bookmarked a website or even checked your own likes?)
  • For information to be remembered it has to be recirculated, repeated, or go viral or we forget because time moves so fast (similar to storytelling?)
  • You can’t look things up easily because we live in a perpetual now – if you don’t understand the context of the discourse, you need to ask someone to catch you up
  • This also makes society very participatory
  • This has weird knock-on effects like needing to always be online to know what’s going on in the world - you can’t just hermit away and study, at a minimum you’re lurking

Among other things. I wonder if this is some kind of loop closing on Postman’s amusing ourselves to death.

If you don’t do the thinking, the thinking will be done for you.

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