Isn’t this largely an internet (and Reddit holdover) culture thing though? There are posts 12-24 hours old still on the very Top of the feed. Sometimes I am away from the site for a day so I am just seeing them. And it seems to go against an unwritten rule to engage at that point. I wish posts had a longer life span, like even of a day or two instead of hours.
Yes, and that culture isn't contextless: in fact many times you can see mechanisms of control as being built into the medium itself, as with through "planned obsolescence" like you mentioned. I haven't labbed this thought out very far, so fair warning:
It wouldn't be great for Redditors to have a feed that puts past posts about how great Saddam was (when the US supported him) on equal footing with his later reputation in the US (when he nationalized resources). Thus the need for dictation at rather than discussion with; dictation requires authority which is scarce in online pseudonymous environments, so what suffices is post-first mediums. These mediums create local context without any grounding in past contexts - a perfect environment to ignore the messy issue of the myriad contradictions and contractions that US media is forced to undergo to resolve the inherent inconsistency in neoliberal ideology.
More concretely, "post-first" stuff like Reddit, 4chan, Tumblr, etc etc consolidates discussion around some topic of conversation dictated by the poster. If that poster gives an opinion in the post, further comments grow off the original like branches in a tree - but rarely break off into a fully-separate discussion uninfluenced by the OP. This is the case for books as well, which lock you into a longform dictation from the author and are usually written hierarchically, by experts for non-experts. Contrast this with a "comment-first" environment such as academia: content and discussion is (well, more) the point, and instead of a tree structure you find a weblike graph of "comments" all making reference to one another which allows for emergent coherence. Obviously there are other filtration mechanisms to keep the wrong people out of this discussion.
Were these massive environments comment-first, it would constantly be somewhat like those videos you see of authority figures saying one thing overlaid with their saying the exact opposite (most recently biolabs in Ukraine).
Isn’t this largely an internet (and Reddit holdover) culture thing though? There are posts 12-24 hours old still on the very Top of the feed. Sometimes I am away from the site for a day so I am just seeing them. And it seems to go against an unwritten rule to engage at that point. I wish posts had a longer life span, like even of a day or two instead of hours.
Yes, and that culture isn't contextless: in fact many times you can see mechanisms of control as being built into the medium itself, as with through "planned obsolescence" like you mentioned. I haven't labbed this thought out very far, so fair warning:
It wouldn't be great for Redditors to have a feed that puts past posts about how great Saddam was (when the US supported him) on equal footing with his later reputation in the US (when he nationalized resources). Thus the need for dictation at rather than discussion with; dictation requires authority which is scarce in online pseudonymous environments, so what suffices is post-first mediums. These mediums create local context without any grounding in past contexts - a perfect environment to ignore the messy issue of the myriad contradictions and contractions that US media is forced to undergo to resolve the inherent inconsistency in neoliberal ideology.
More concretely, "post-first" stuff like Reddit, 4chan, Tumblr, etc etc consolidates discussion around some topic of conversation dictated by the poster. If that poster gives an opinion in the post, further comments grow off the original like branches in a tree - but rarely break off into a fully-separate discussion uninfluenced by the OP. This is the case for books as well, which lock you into a longform dictation from the author and are usually written hierarchically, by experts for non-experts. Contrast this with a "comment-first" environment such as academia: content and discussion is (well, more) the point, and instead of a tree structure you find a weblike graph of "comments" all making reference to one another which allows for emergent coherence. Obviously there are other filtration mechanisms to keep the wrong people out of this discussion.
Were these massive environments comment-first, it would constantly be somewhat like those videos you see of authority figures saying one thing overlaid with their saying the exact opposite (most recently biolabs in Ukraine).