Social media platforms are not like dying malls

greyenlightenment.com

3 points·paulpauper··2 comments

I fucking love the 19th and 20th centuries, the speed of innovation and change has been amazing with rapid development of entire new forms of media and experience, but it makes me wonder, are we kinda at the end of that? There’s only so many novel ways to engage the five senses, if we give up on social media…

It’s hard to imagine 100 years from now social media won’t exist. Intergalactic social media is still social media.

> I fucking love the 19th and 20th centuries, the speed of innovation and change has been amazing with rapid development of entire new forms of media and experience, but it makes me wonder, are we kinda at the end of that?

Yes, we are more than 20 years past the end of that (“the 19th and 20th centuries”).

> There’s only so many novel ways to engage the five senses, if we give up on social media…

(1) It’s not 350 BCE anymore, I don’t care what Aristotle said, we know now that we have at least 8 major sensory systems, and there are debates about the exact number of senses with a low plausible value of 8 and an upper bound to the current argument of about 33.

(2) To the extent that it is true that there are a finite number of ways to engage however many senses we have, “if we give up on social media” is pure excess verbiage. The statement is more or less true without it.

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