Why are the most important people in media reading The Awl?

All swept along by algorithms of persistent evolution. A nice companion piece to the blog entry from Philosophical Disquisitions on the import–philosophically and sociologically–for thinking the importance of algorithms in our lives…

But Herrman and Buchanan are wary of the distorting effects [social media] platforms bring. There’s a sense that social sharing is impossible to game, Herrman says, that makes it authentic. But platforms have their own dynamics. People share content that confirms something they believe or that they want people to believe about them. More arbitrarily, certain forms thrive according to the changing metrics of Facebook’s algorithm: time spent off site, or comments. Teasingly captioned videos or quizzes rule for a time, then die off as behaviors and algorithms adjust. Everything is accelerating and nothing lasts for long. At The Awl, Buchanan and Herrman have found a perch where they can stand back and watch the show.

“I’m ready for a big storm,” Herrman says, putting down his beer and launching into an exaggerated vision of the future. “Everyone wakes up, and it’s just sand. And most people die, but a few survive, and they all walk in different directions. And I’m ready for this to happen every three months. That’s the cool cyberpunk outcome of all this. Everything remakes itself all the time, and then nothing is sustainable, and the idea that you could do any of these things we’re doing now as jobs will be some ridiculous anachronism.” The Awl, he says, laughing, is “the counterexample to entropy that proves the rule. Just wait.”

via Why are the most important people in media reading The Awl? | The Verge.