"Why does everyone feel overwhelmed by information? Why does it feel impossible to trust what passes through our streams? We tend to blame individual publications, specific platforms, or bad actors. The real answer has less to do with any single media entity and more with structural changes in the information ecosystem. I started my "information" life typing copy on an ill-tempered Remington."
"Authority used to be the organizing principle of information, and thus the media. You earned attention by being right, by being first in discovery, or by being big enough to be the default. That world is gone. The new and current organizing principle of information is velocity. What matters now is how fast something moves through the network: how quickly it is clicked, shared, quoted, replied to, remixed, and replaced."
Information production moved from slow, gatekept processes to rapid, direct publication enabled by the Internet, blogging, and social media. The ecosystem has become much larger, faster, and noisier over the past decade and a half. Authority formerly organized attention through correctness, primacy, or scale. Velocity now organizes attention, prioritizing how quickly content is clicked, shared, quoted, replied to, remixed, and replaced. A system tuned for speed makes authority ornamental and rewards motion before judgment. These structural dynamics produce collective overwhelm and erode trust independent of any single publication, platform, or bad actor.
Read at On my Om
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