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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Our Brand Could Be Your Crisis
We Are Your Friends is not our youth, but it might as well be
The Year the Pandemic "Ended" (Part II)
A timeline of covid normalization in the US in 2022 (Part II)
“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...
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.
Healthy Boundaries
...bloggers at Computerworld discussed the act of watch-wearing in terms of performativity, another online community took to social media to describe a more visceral response to the sleek piece of...
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...
The Disconnectionists
...always had been. Despite his great ascetic effort, he could not reach escape velocity from the Internet. Instead he found an “inextricable link” between life online and off, between flesh...