Serious action
...I have a long essay in the latest New Inquiry issue about the metaphor of “microfame” and what sort of ideological work it performs. (It’s not online yet,...
Social discovery vs. sociability
...One of things Dan Slater reports on in Love in the Time of Algorithms is online dating’s evolution into “social discovery,” which is not a matter of algorithms...
No Epiphanies Whatsoever
...Internet fascination—or an online meme even in the smallest of online corners—their character usually gets flattened through repetition and analysis, and repetition of analysis. Against these odds, Marnell has sustained...
Our Brand Could Be Your Crisis
We Are Your Friends is not our youth, but it might as well be
Sunday Reading
...flurry of online legislation moves through California legislature: “SB 1306 is the absurdity degree zero of online panacea hallucination: It creates a ‘New University of California’ that must offer credentials...
Death Stares
...replete with snazzy filters. As more people go online, impromptu and unintentional memorials arise and dead people’s accounts become virtual shrines and spaces for collective grief. By Facebook’s 10th anniversary...
Social-media redlining and “social enforcement”
...the sort of contacts I should make there to improve my creditworthiness. As this Economist article reports, banks are beginning to gather online social-media data to perform risk assessment for...
Collateral Damage
...having made any money at all. SSR: So how do you live? WO: I do various odd jobs online. I’m a social-media assistant. I find whatever work I can. And...
Fifty Shades of Yellow
...status online through obsessively tight reading practices of celebrities’ lives. The kinds of information sharing in these communities developed out of a need to establish social hierarchy in the nascent...
Social Media, Social Factory
...on the expression of individualism. Facebook wants to be the place where you feel most yourself, with the most control over how you are regarded. The online repository becomes a...
Devastation in Meatspace
...of the historical “propaganda war”: control of the networked space online. The IDF have run a comprehensive social media campaign from the first stages of the new assault, announcing the...
The Scapegoating Machine
...of them.) Gawker’s willingness to single out individuals as targets of public ire, and to galvanize online mobs against them, was a source of its appeal and at the same...
Personal Ads
...Jean-Michel Basquiat King Brand (1983) In an online milieu where everyone markets themselves, net artists have made selling out its own medium In the Atkins-diet-crazed early aughts, a...
Open Secrets: Literature as Gossip in the Digital Age
...photos, endlessly falsified and therefore perfectible online personas, we are all invited to construct ourselves closer to what we dream of being than what we simply are. Authenticity becomes a...
Escape from Love Jail
...to escape from.” As many have argued (including me!), constructing our identity and duplicating our social networks in online platforms has become a kind of capitalist production, effacing the old...
in the Name of INJUSTICE
...so-called Kirsopp Snake edition of stereohell is a forgery that purported to be a digest of stereohell that Kirsopp Snake constructed from bits collected online and rearranged in 2010. The...