Fear of Screens
...when she discusses a “world of screens,” or when she laments “the pull of the online world” away from the real world of humans. “We turn to our phones instead...
Very Serious Populists
...Ben Shahn Voting Booths (1950) The point of online voting systems like Reddit is not to highlight the best content, but to build and maintain hegemony There is...
Games of Truth
...have to build the community (that once was geographical) as an online audience and hold it together by performing for it perpetually. The truth test becomes a way to ascertain...
Social media as masochism
...it intensifies it. Not only would this let us keep obeying the imperative to "express ourselves" and build out our all-important online reputations and networks, but it would allow us...
Coming & Crying
...online via the website Kickstarter, which they then plan to take to an on-demand press. Their goal was $3,000. At present they’ve garnered $4,728 from 114 backers (of which, yes,...
Games of Truth
...the productive value of our uniquely wrought subjectivity to garner social recognition; we have to build the community (that once was a geographical given) as an online audience and hold...
The Algorithm and the Watchtower
...year: “As you read this online, the United States government makes a note.” And as more recent reporting from the Times and ProPublica has disclosed, this is made possible not...
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...
Permanent Records
...my feelings change with time. When I look at my middle school students post photos and videos of themselves online, I have the instinctual reaction of adult horror at the...
Wikipedia Politics
...a strange frame for the evanescent, ephemeral editing of an online encyclopedia. The sheer ambition of Wikipedia’s mission, “to make the sum total of human knowledge available for free to...
Social Media Is Not Self-Expression
...a "connected world" all around you, and there is no denying that being online metes out "connectedness" in measured, addictive doses. But those doses contain real sociality, and they are...
Feasts Under the Bridge
...drawers into the trash — adding an egg and chopped peanuts to their instant ramen!), so too has trolling appeared to go beyond its existence online. "In another image, he...
The Summer of Love and the Holy Fair
...that the concert industry is actually doing better now than it was before the pandemic? A widely-shared German study from 2021 proclaimed that “mass gathering events” like arena shows “contribute...
–⁂–(⨂__⨂)–⁂–
...them has been published online yet. It's 130+ pages of original, unseen critical work on drones, illustrated and designed by Imp Kerr. As far as we can tell, it's the...
Softer Than Softcore
...meridian response (ASMR) has become the focal point of a robust community of online enthusiasts. In its protoplasmic early life on blogs and message boards, it was simply dubbed “the...
The Other Foot
...on authenticity in online communities, I began interviewing personal style bloggers, becoming more interested in girls and women who showed off clothes from Target or Goodwill than those who, like...