C. Thi Nguyen

In kind of normal communicative life, there are so many different values that we could be judging ourselves by and that we could be aiming for.

You could be communicating to be funny or entertain each other, right?

You could be communicating to connect.

You could be communicating to learn.

You could be communicating to figure things out.

You could be communicating, right?

That plurality of values...

means that different people can be judging a conversation in different ways.

Like sometimes I've had conversations at parties where it's very clear that the other person is trying to one-up me and I was trying to like have an interesting connection and then they think they won the conversation.

I think it was like the worst conversation ever.

Like that's completely possible.

But if you're on social media, there is a scoring system.

And if you orient yourself towards it, then you have an instant and complete way to like

you know, Insta compare each tweet, Insta compare each post, right?

And Insta compare different individuals in terms of their like follower or subscriber count.

So it's that like reduction to a single dimension that then gets quantized so that we can make instant comparisons.

That seems, that to me is like this weird, intense feature that is

an artificial feature of some institutions and technological systems.

And it's game-ish, so you can get sucked into it and like start relating to it like a game.

There's a crucial massive difference from most games.