On Flooding: Drowning the Culture in Sameness

In the cacophony of content and conversation around that content, the most familiar voices at the largest, fastest, trendiest outlets carry the farthest; according to SimilarWeb, which tracks website statistics, only five sites dominate around 50 percent of the share of newspaper traffic in the U.S. CJR also reports that newspapers online, now with a borderless audience, publish more than twice as many stories as they used to, often with a much smaller staff. Collins describes how the projected utopia of infinite content has revealed itself in the guise of Netflix to be, in actual fact, just an infinite reconfiguration of the same things over and over. This is how the top 10 stories on The New York Times website last year were all about U.S. elections except one (Brett Kavanaugh’s yearbook page took the 10th spot).

Source: longreads.com