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...
Closing the Loop
...of non-normative identities to circulate and receive validation on user-driven platforms like Tumblr and Instagram — whittled itself down to its most palatable iteration. With aid from online art and...
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...
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...
“The Beyblade Strategy” or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Focused Protection
...masking,” an idea popularized by J.G. Allen (otherwise notable for, as early as October 2021, loudly advocating to drop masking in schools as quickly as possible). “One-way masking” is the...
The Year the Pandemic "Ended" (Part II)
A timeline of covid normalization in the US in 2022 (Part II)
Champagne Wishes and Crypto Dreams
Of course there are crypto memoirs. But how do they theorize history?
Folk Etymologies
If language is the problem, it isn't always the solution.
The Failure Addict
...around the different places online where someone might send some indication that they have noticed me, send some message that tells me I exist — one that says, Everyone thought...
Out of Sight
...of the calls was worth paying. Blind people from around the world have access to many technologies that get us online. Windows screen readers speak what’s on the screen, and...