Irwin Chen

The Eternal Present of Social Media

How social media's endless present is creating a new kind of cultural amnesia

Try to recall what you saw on social media the last time you scrolled. You’ll notice you can barely remember any posts, even if you scrolled for hours. This phenomenon has been confirmed by studies that have found that social media impairs both short-term and long-term memory. A social media feed is like the Lethe, the mythical river in whose waters lost souls sought absolution, and received it in the form of oblivion.
— Gurwinder Bhogal, "Social media is engineering amnesia: We’re trapped in Big Tech’s mind maze"

Social platforms are quietly rewiring

i feel better after i type to you

ai

The human drive to form emotional bonds with digital entities hasn't changed since ELIZA - AI has just gotten better at completing the circuit.

The recent Daily episode following the death of Adam Raine, induced by ChatGPT, reminded me of a less tragic but similarly sad book, i feel better after i type to you, which was a book published after the 2006 leak of entries typed into the AOL search box. Reading through the raw unedited transcript of one user's search queries felt like listening to a person whispering to an oracle, almost like looking into a person's bare soul.

That was a one-way transcript, just the question but not the answer, though purportedly there were responses. But, in this recent incident and

The Shift from Orality to Literacy

literacy

Imagining the way the technology of writing and reading reconfigures one's brain

Last night, as I was watching this anime series on Netflix called Orb: On the Movements of the Earth (チ。―地球の運動について―) with my two sons, this scene came on at the end of Season 1 Episode 9, and it struck me as the perfect entry point to the concept of orality (apologies for the bootleg quality and lack of sound):

0:00

/1:45

The series, based on a Japanese manga drawn by Uoto (魚豊) from 2020-2022, is a quasi-historical fiction centering on the discovery of heliocentrism in 15th Century Europe. It is a speculative portrait of a time

Back to Life, Back to Orality

Journalism

Just last week, we heard this pronouncement from D. Graham Burnett, a historian of Science and Technology at Princeton on the Hard Fork podcast:

YouTube Short excerpt from a longer segment on the Hard Fork podcast featuring D. Graham Burnett.

Great insights here. Let's go through them line by line. Graham says:

Longform immersive literacy is coming to an end as a widespread cultural phenomenon.

"Longform immersive literacy" is such a good way to frame deep reading and books. I like the distinction he's deliberately making between deep, contemplative, analytical, "good" reading and fast, cursory, easily distracted skimming, "not so

The Beginning

A black and white photograph of a seated man with glasses, holding a boombo — Photo by Malick Sidibé (1935–2016) taken at his legendary Studio Malick in Bamako, Mali. The background has been artificially extended by Adobe Firefly's generative fill.

Imagine the stretch of time humans have had speech as a year-long calendar.

For 364 days, every story, myth, recipe, and scrap of knowledge worth remembering can only be held in our brains and our bodies.

At the end of December 31st, 11:45 PM, a very tiny number of humans devise a mark-making system to record grain harvests and account for livestock.

At thirty seconds before midnight, 11:59:30, the printing press appears. Even after a few seconds (which amount to centuries), less than 10% of the global human population is able to read and write.

And at

Posts by Irwin Chen