benfridge • reading

"Zuckerberg had long held a mechanistic view of society. From Facebook’s early days, he would refer to the social network as a “graph,” a term of art borrowed from the mathematical discipline of network theory. One of the curiosities of the early twenty-first century is the way so much power over social relations came into the hands of young men with more interest in numbers than in people." "When you chose a medium, you also chose a way of speaking. The medium was part of the conversation." "By imposing what Mark Zuckerberg disdainfully calls friction on the processes of information production, distribution, and retrieval, the specialization of media networks and devices also imposed order on the welter of information that was suddenly pouring into people’s homes. The specialized technology served as a means to sort and segregate information and regulate the pace and timing of its delivery."