what is that we do online?

is that of the user the best paradigm to understand online activity at large?

what other paradigms of online activity are there? do human agents behave more as admins or moderators than users?

to be clear: the admin is technically another type of user, but you get what i mean

wikipedia: "Users of computer systems and software products generally lack the technical expertise required to fully understand how they work."

Let's put it like this, using a thought experiment. The offline world suddenly disappears: no cities, no buildings, no bodies, no objects. Human agents are only able to interact through and within current digital interfaces. How human activity would differ? How our understanding of current online activities would differ?

is world-building, understood as building a durable interface with the totality of the real, still possible online?

more fundamentally, is the "online" a world?

again, following Arendt, one could say that a website is a work/object, while a platform is a machine

While acting for her means breaking the "fateful automation of sheer happening". Sounds familiar?

Reminded now that in his reflections on the "automatic society" Stiegler describes a shift from the everyday life to the administered life. Might be the 'Vita Administrativa' (both administering and being administering) the crucial sphere of activity missing in Arendt's model of human practical capacities?

the user uses, the agent acts

if I were to point out a fundamental paradigm shift of user behavior in terms of interaction with an interface, due to the advent of the corporate web, I'd say that the user was reconfigured as a scroller, and therefore as passive consumer because the interaction is purely mechanical and only accidentally performed manually.

the paradox seems to be that web 2.0 which was supposed to bring MORE interactivity, eventually reduced it

ok, I put some of these notes quickly together on the blog. Main idea: proletarisation of user interaction. Comments welcome! https://networkcultures.org/entreprecariat/infinite-scroll-proletarisation/

apropos, Simondon argues that the machine replaces the tool-equipped individual (the worker)

and soon this book on "lurking" will be out! Subtitle: "How a person became a user" https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lurking-by-joanne-mcneil-a-lurkers-history-of-online.html

i guess the fundamental question is: can we really consider the web a metamedium?

forgot about Striphas notion of "controlled consumption", which is quite related to the user condition I'd say (source is my thesis)

@entreprecariat

cc. @OCRbot