Me, on the Rutger’s tragedy

Here’s me talking on Minnesota Public Radio about how the biases of digital media were in part responsible for amplifying a mean prank into a seemingly suicide-worthy attack:

My main point is not that digital media killed the poor college kid, but that two of digital media’s biases contributed to the situation. First, digital media is biased toward distribution. Every digital image is as good as distributed from its creation. Second, digital media is biased toward desensitization. We don’t feel the human impact of what we do- even though they are so tremendously amplified.

As a result, we get unpredictable results. And this is why we really do need to learn and then teach the biases of these media.