Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism
Melancholy has always been with us. Nowadays, though, it’s a design problem—its highs and lows coded into the social media platforms on which we spend so much of our lives. We click, we scroll; we swipe, we like. And after it all, we wonder where the time went, and what, other than a flat and empty feeling, we got for it.
            Sad by Design offers a critical analysis of our social media environment and what it’s doing to us. Geert Lovink analyzes the problems of toxic viral memes, online addiction, and the lure of fake news. He shows how attempts to design sites to solve these problems have, in their studied efforts to be apolitical, been unable to generate either a serious critique or legitimate alternatives. But there is an answer: Lovink calls for us to acknowledge the engineered intimacy of these sites—because boredom, he argues, is the first stage of overcoming “platform nihilism,” which can free us to organize to stop the data harvesting industries that run them.
 
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Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism
Melancholy has always been with us. Nowadays, though, it’s a design problem—its highs and lows coded into the social media platforms on which we spend so much of our lives. We click, we scroll; we swipe, we like. And after it all, we wonder where the time went, and what, other than a flat and empty feeling, we got for it.
            Sad by Design offers a critical analysis of our social media environment and what it’s doing to us. Geert Lovink analyzes the problems of toxic viral memes, online addiction, and the lure of fake news. He shows how attempts to design sites to solve these problems have, in their studied efforts to be apolitical, been unable to generate either a serious critique or legitimate alternatives. But there is an answer: Lovink calls for us to acknowledge the engineered intimacy of these sites—because boredom, he argues, is the first stage of overcoming “platform nihilism,” which can free us to organize to stop the data harvesting industries that run them.
 
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Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism

Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism

by Geert Lovink
Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism

Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism

by Geert Lovink

Paperback

$33.00 
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Overview

Melancholy has always been with us. Nowadays, though, it’s a design problem—its highs and lows coded into the social media platforms on which we spend so much of our lives. We click, we scroll; we swipe, we like. And after it all, we wonder where the time went, and what, other than a flat and empty feeling, we got for it.
            Sad by Design offers a critical analysis of our social media environment and what it’s doing to us. Geert Lovink analyzes the problems of toxic viral memes, online addiction, and the lure of fake news. He shows how attempts to design sites to solve these problems have, in their studied efforts to be apolitical, been unable to generate either a serious critique or legitimate alternatives. But there is an answer: Lovink calls for us to acknowledge the engineered intimacy of these sites—because boredom, he argues, is the first stage of overcoming “platform nihilism,” which can free us to organize to stop the data harvesting industries that run them.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780745339344
Publisher: Pluto Press
Publication date: 06/15/2019
Series: Digital Barricades
Pages: 192
Product dimensions: 5.25(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Geert Lovink is a media theorist and internet critic and the author of Zero Comments, Networks Without a Cause, and Social Media Abyss. He founded the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and teaches at the European Graduate School. He stopped using Facebook in 2010.
 

Table of Contents

Series Preface 
Acknowledgements 
Introduction: Society of the Social
1. Overcoming the Disillusioned Internet 
2. Social Media as Ideology 
3. Distraction and its Discontents 
4. Sad by Design
5. Media Network Platform: Three Architectures 
6. From Registration to Extermination: On Technological Violence 
7. Narcissus Confirmed: Technologies of the Minimal Selfie 
8. Mask Design: Aesthetics of the Faceless 
9. Memes as Strategy: European Origins and Debates 
10. Before Building the Avant-Garde of the Commons 
Notes 
Bibliography
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