Atlantic, The

A barista gets burned at work, buys first-aid cream at Target, and later that day sees a Facebook ad for the same product. In another Target, someone shouts down the aisle to a companion to pick up some Red Bull; on the ride home, Instagram serves a sponsored post for the beverage. A home baker wishes aloud for a KitchenAid mixer, and moments after there’s an ad for one on his phone. Two friends are talking about recent trips to Japan, and soon after one gets hawked cheap flights there.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the internet are not media. They are something new we do not yet fully understand. To call these platforms publishers is to presume that their task is merely to produce content. It is to presume, then, that the internet should be produced, packaged, and polished, and that when someone says something bad anywhere on it then the entire internet is beschmutzed. The larger question, of course, is what the internet is and how it fits into society and society into it. We are just beginning to see what it can be.

Under a new reorganization plan from the Trump administration, federal agencies would have less than four years to digitize all their paper processes. The White House released its overarching plan to reorganize the federal government, and, as with most of the administration’s management plans, it emphasizes technology’s role in the future of government. The plan calls for digitizing all of the federal government’s recordkeeping by Dec. 31, 2022, at which time the National Archives and Records Administration would stop accepting paper records from agencies.