The Top 5: Community, getting old, and weird LinkedIn
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Welcome to your weekly edition of the Top 5 articles we’ve read this week. Each week, we read dozens of articles in the hope we find essays and reporting that speak to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. We hope you enjoy our list, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation!
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The Top 5 articles for your week
“The Community Community” (Comment Magazine)
Because Nathan Beacom looks at another aspect of our digital lives, and how a key mechanism for how we organize ourselves, has changed.
Still, something important has changed about the way we think about community in the internet age. A word that once referred to a group of people sharing life together in a particular place has come to refer, today, to abstract categories. Where once we might have spoken of the community of the South Bronx or the community of Parma, Ohio, we now talk about everything from the fishing community to the gaming community to the disability rights community, abstract groups that may not share life or know one another at all. This is not just a minor linguistic development; it means that the idea of community has been lifted out of the context of concrete relationships, and the consequences of this change are significant for our public life.
“What They Don’t Tell You About Getting Old” (NYT)
Because this is a delightful, earnest, and vulnerable essay on how hard it is to get old from Roger Rosenblatt.
“TikTok Extends the Wasteland” (Hedgehog Review)
Because Jeff Hewitt notices something important specifically concerning TikTok:
The confessional is now our primary mode of addressing the wider culture. Nowhere is this more visible than in Gen Z’s newfound confidence online. A recent spate of articles on that cohort’s contempt for Millennial quirks shows just how ingrained the rules of television have become. Take the “Millennial Pause”: that moment some Millennials take to confirm that an app is recording before addressing their audience. Despite its origin as a meme, that split second illustrates a real generational difference. The Millennial Pause draws attention to the artifice of the confessional. But for Zoomers, most of whom can’t remember a time before smartphone cameras or social media, this is tantamount to breaking the rules. Because for the always online—as it was for the cast of The Real World—the cameras are always rolling. As TV critic David Marc noted in his 1984 Atlantic essay “Understanding Television,” production styles come and go at a breakneck pace. Shifting attitudes and the constant search for new gimmicks result in what Marc called “an intense comedy of obsolescence.” The youth of TikTok have internalized this process.
“What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World?” (Wired)
Because while most AI discourse currently focuses on the impending doom of AI development (valid!) or about how it’ll revolutionize our lives into utopia, this essay looks at a certain kind of AI and how it deals with diplomacy and concludes that AI might be a bit more harmless and helpful than we can predict.
“It's not just you. LinkedIn has gotten really weird.” (Insider)
Because where is the “too personal” line on one of the only social media networks geared towards professional work? Rob Price ponders, “No one really knows what it means to be "professional" anymore.”
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