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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The Novel in the Age of Digital Diversion
In The End of Absence, an alternately shrewd and sentimental account of Internet-age distraction, author Michael Harris offers an autobiographical parable: once a lonely pre-tech teenager obsessed with fantasy novels, the now 30-something Harris finds he’s lost his ability to read more than a few pages without stopping to check his phone. Frustrated, he resolves…
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“Sharing” the Israeli Occupation
In April of 2014, an Israeli combat soldier from the Nahal Brigade named David Adamov was captured on camera violently threatening a Palestinian teenager in Hebron. After a video of the event posted on YouTube went viral, Adamov was suspended by the military. His suspension instigated a social media protest, with soldiers from his unit…
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Beyond Neoliberalism
Most of the people I know are constantly seeking self-improvement. Not spiritual enlightenment or knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but the kind of self-improvement that promises career advancement, celebrity, or money. They view their life as a project that must be carefully managed. They worry about how many people follow them on Twitter, if their love…
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Status Updates
How do we read Tumblr pages, Facebook updates, and Instagram feeds for plot? What sorts of narrators do social media enable and promote? The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty by Amanda Filipacchi and The First Bad Man by Miranda July both feature narrators who continually reflect on how they externalize their inner selves. Their worlds function like Tumblr: selfhood becomes…
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Franzen Makes Nice
Reading Jonathan Franzen’s fifth novel, Purity, in a state at once sympathetic and skeptical, I kept thinking of George Kaplan. In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest, a ring of foreign spies mistakes the protagonist, Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill, for Kaplan, a fictional decoy created by the CIA. No matter how strenuously Thornhill protests…
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Open Markets, Open Projects: Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness
A decade ago, the precursors of today’s social media were known as “Web 2.0,” and came complete with a barrage of ideological presuppositions. According to rhetoric pioneered at O’Reilly conferences and echoed in Wired and on BlogSpot, the “1.0” web, cluttered with proprietary plugins and e-commerce failures, would be abandoned in favor of an Internet…
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A Global Neuromancer
Neuromancer is now more than 30 years old, a considerable time to remain a classic. Its publication in the Orwellian year will seem ironic and laden with symbolism only for those who think Orwell has …
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Adventure Capitalists
William Gibson has become a reluctant prophet for cyberculture. Although his early work failed to imagine some technological particulars (like the smart phone), he foresaw that cyberspace—a term he coined—would soon colonize our imaginations and daily experiences. Despite his ambivalent representations of technological change, his work became something of a guiding vision not only for…
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Writing Technology
Read my blog, please, but don’t dare peek into my diary. Even though these two genres employ some of the same conventions—a diurnal relation to time, a preoccupation with subjective experience—one is a product of social media, while the other is not meant to be read by others. Donald Winnicott, the influential British psychoanalyst of…
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Wither(ing) Journalism?
The journalism crisis continues. Yet, as so often happens when social problems require structural reform, once the alarm bells fell silent—as they did after the sudden 2008–2009 downturn—our sense of urgency subsided. As with the broader financial system, whose collapse accelerated the fourth estate’s decline, the status quo has reasserted itself after being jolted. Previous…
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Pynchon’s Children
The work of Thomas Pynchon has long been synonymous with literary postmodernism, especially the version that involves manic overplotting and paranoid speculation about sinister systems whose names elude us. He has also always been understood to be broadly “countercultural” in some ’60s sense, championing the little guy against those sinister forces. While these characterizations are…
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Wait Cursor
A girl, bundled against the cold, holds up her hand as though requesting pause or distance—freeze, stop, stay back. Perfectly centered in the space of her bright palm is a Mac loading wheel frozen in mid-spin, its moon-burst rays making a value scale of the photograph’s various grays. Roland Barthes had a phrase—“prophecy in reverse”—for…
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Ordinary Lives
“Nobody’s listening!” (“Le pays, en un mot, ne se sent pas représenté,” or literally, “The country, in a word, feels that it is not listened to.”) Pierre Rosanvallon, a professor of history at the Collège de France in Paris, makes that statement the cornerstone of an ambitious project (of which more shortly) to counter the…
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The Democratic Surround: A Conversation Between Fred Turner and Clay Shirky
Last December, Public Culture senior editor Fred Turner sat down with Clay Shirky, the author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age and Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, to talk about Turner’s new book, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. A prequel to the influential From Counterculture to Cyberculture which…
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The Folly of Technological Solutionism: An Interview with Evgeny Morozov
Evgeny Morozov, a former denizen of the technology world, gained notoriety as a skeptic of that world with his 2010 book The Net Delusion, in which he argued that technology enthusiasts or “cyber …
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Don’t Throw Anything Out
First, a disclaimer. I am too old to review this book. It aims to address media scholars, communication professionals, as well as active and curious members of the new participatory culture. I belong in the first category, but I hardly qualify as part of the third. I decided to continue nevertheless, because the book proposes…
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Books On Books
You need a birthday present, let’s say for your cousin’s boyfriend. You’re bad at guessing shirt sizes, so it might as well be a book. You find a bookstore (if you’re lucky). You make for the section that nobody knows what to call: in front of the cash register, between the chocolate bars and fridge…
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Books, Not MOOCs
So you’ve been browsing around online, and here you are. You’re on the couch, or you’re eating lunch, or you’re in transit, or you’re in the back of the classroom, or you’re at your desk, attending a virtual class that sounded like a good idea when you started but that hasn’t really captured your attention.…
