Tag
Internet
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Our Golden Age of Reading (Online)
There is an urgent need for new, more affirmative ways to participate in culture, especially against the ongoing systematic whiteness of publishing and the exclusivity of elite institutions.
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Counter-histories of the Internet
What could the internet have been? We’ve grown so used to our digital networks that they can seem like a force of nature, with laws as immutable as the laws of physics …
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Masculinity on the Mat
From Ready Player One to Roseanne, popular culture in 2018 might be looked back on as “problematic,” to use a polite academic term, in its attempts to bottle and sell 1980s nostalgia. Conservative in both form and content …
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Shoptalk: Overheard at AOIR
This October, scholars from 30 countries headed to Montreal for the 19th annual meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers. Experts discussed the state …
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Public Thinker: Siva Vaidhyanathan on Facebook and Other “Antisocial” Media
Siva Vaidhyanathan has built a career as a media studies and communications … [none-for-homepage]
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“What Invisibility Looks Like”
Richard S. Leghorn, the Pentagon official who coined the phrase “Information Age,” in 1960, never thought it would catch on. More than half a century later, no …
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We Like Short Shorts
We seem to be in an age in which short forms have risen from minor to major cultural commodities. On November 30, 2017, word went out on the internet that Vine, a defunct video-sharing platform, might come back from the dead. The news made a lot of people very excited. Ever since Vine discontinued uploads…
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Digital Lies, Real Ghosts
We’ve all obsessed over someone who isn’t there: fictional characters, an absent lover, the dead. The verb “obsess” means to haunt, harass, or torment, as an evil spirit. But we are usually the conjurors of our own ghosts. Andrew O’Hagan is different. The British journalist’s third work of nonfiction, The Secret Life, collects three previously…
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The Big Picture: Misinformation Society
Trump’s election laid bare structural flaws in our news and information systems. As mainstream news media sensationalized and trivialized what was at stake in the elections, social media amplified misinformation and propaganda. These media pathologies paved the way for the triumph of a demagogue. While criticism of such problems has escalated since the election, the…
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The World Silicon Valley Made
A repairman at the Shenzhen electronic bazaar treks from stall to stall, gathering inexpensive camera modules, casings, glass displays, batteries, and motherboards, and then, with only a screwdriver and his fingernails, he pieces it all together to produce a tiny talisman capable of channeling the world’s intelligence. To consumers, the iPhone can seem hermetic, consummate,…
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The Big Picture: Trump on Twitter
On its face, Twitter appears to be a quintessentially democratic medium. It promotes individualized expression, helps build social networks, and, until recently, seemed to epitomize the decentralized public sphere long called for by liberal theorists and digital utopians alike. During Donald Trump’s campaign for president, however, it became an engine of authoritarianism. Day after day,…
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Your Own Pirate Radio
In my favorite bar in the world, all the men look like Lino Ventura and all the women look like a photograph by Brassaï. They only serve two drinks: pastis and cold vodka (Żołądkowa). The only food …
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The Great LOLCat Massacre
Recently, for work, I read through 10 years’ worth of the New York Times best-seller list and noticed a strange phenomenon. Since December 17 …
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Elif Batuman’s Apprenticeship
MFA fiction programs may have no fiercer critic than Elif Batuman. She has mocked the writing workshop multiple times in print and mourned the kind of prose it …
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Books after the Death of the Book
Last summer I decided to assign Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects in the graduate course I was getting ready to teach. The title …
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Feeling like the Internet
What has the advent of the internet meant for the novel? Apart, that is, from its having opened a gaping time-sucking sinkhole at the center of culture? The sweet drip-feed of sentiment and savagery downloading to our devices is absorbing attention that might otherwise have been poured into books, but the effects of the internet on…
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What Is It Like to Be an Elephant?
Why did Harambe become a meme? In a post-election landscape that demands we acknowledge Internet trolling as a practice with world-historical consequences …
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The Politics of Networking a Nation
In 1981, one year before his death, the Soviet cybernetician and computer pioneer Victor Glushkov published the book What Is the OGAS? OGAS was the Russian acronym for All-State Automated System for Gathering and Processing of Information for the Accounting, Planning, and Governance of the National Economy, USSR—a good illustration of the Soviet tendency toward…
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Being Data
In 1966, Der Spiegel interviewed Martin Heidegger: SPIEGEL: And what takes the place of philosophy now? HEIDEGGER: Cybernetics.1 Even before the mass production of personal computers, Heidegger saw the writing on the wall for the humanities. Today, STEM funding far outpaces institutional investment in philosophy, history, or literature departments. To some, the “digital humanities” offer…
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Gamifying the Workplace
Anyone who has read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer no doubt remembers the fence-painting scene. Consigned as a punishment by his Aunt Polly to spend a Saturday whitewashing 30 yards of wooden fence, Tom instead recruits neighborhood boys to do the chore for him. He convinces his marks that fence painting—far from being drudgery—is an…
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On Accelerationism
At a time when the future seems to belong to Chicago-school economists and the Internet to Google and the NSA, a new movement calls to re-imagine left politics from top to bottom.
