Culture, Communication, Complexity.

Tag: mass communication

cybernetics

The Popularity Contest: Technology, Politics and the Machinery of Attention

Post author By G
Post date Sep 15, 2026
No Comments on The Popularity Contest: Technology, Politics and the Machinery of Attention

A civilisation increasingly governed by visibility mistakes popularity for substance.

Tags attention, communication, legitimacy, marginalisation, mass communication, politics, popularity, social media, synchronisation, systems, technology, visibility

cybernetics

Barry, from Parramatta

A technologically-mediated civilisation has built planetary systems of prediction and control around biological reflexes still calibrated for tribe, threat, status, and symbolic belonging.

communication cybernetics politics

It is not about politics

Across many countries, the current wave of populism looks like a political shift. It is, but it is also something deeper: a change in how communication systems select and stabilise meaning.

Tags algorithmic amplification, attention economy, cognitive dynamics, collective behaviour, communication architecture, communication networks, communication systems, communication theory, complex systems, cultural dynamics, cybernetics, digital media, digital society, distributed systems, emergent behaviour, feedback loops, governance systems, information ecosystems, information flow, information integrity, information overload, information propagation, institutional-lag, mass communication, media dynamics, media influence, media theory, modern media ecology, narrative dynamics, network dynamics, networked communication, phase delay, political communication, political complexity, political systems, populism, public discourse, relational systems, semantic compression, signal transmission, signal vs noise, social complexity, social media effects, socio political systems, structural dynamics, system theory, systemic risk, systems thinking, temporal dynamics, temporal misalignment, timing and delay