Tag
Social Media
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China’s Imagined Pasts and Futures: On YouTuber Li Ziqi
She may not hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, or herd cattle in the evening; still, her over 130 videos testify to the mind-blowing breadth of her abilities.
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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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Physical Books, Digital Lives
“On or around December 1910,” Virginia Woolf famously said, “human character changed.” If my memories of December 2010 serve, that’s when social media …
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Anna Biller on Classic Films and Twitter Feminisms
To date, the independent filmmaker Anna Biller has tweeted somewhere in the …
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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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Robot and Juliet
What makes us fall in love with technology? In those enchanting early days, new tech can seduce with expanded horizons, allowing us to travel faster and farther, or connect across longer distances; and we appreciate this …
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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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Imagining the Near Future: An Interview with Dexter Palmer
At a reading this past winter, Dexter Palmer introduced his latest novel, Version Control, by sharing private messages swapped between Rebecca Wright, the story’s protagonist, and her would-be suitors through an online dating site known as Lovability. The series of awkward exchanges met with gentle scoffs and knowing laughter from the assembled audience. As social…
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A Sit-In in the House of Representatives
I was fortunate enough, as an intern this summer for Rep. Marc Veasey (D-TX-33), to witness last week’s historic sit-in by Democrats on the House floor. I was at a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee when the sit-in began Wednesday morning. At one point I realized that there was only one Democrat left…
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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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On Spectacle and Silence
The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images. —Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle 1 We sat on the couch together. The burble-voiced sportscasters, the referee’s whistle, “First down and 10.” I was, I am tethered to my father. His fingers…
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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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The Dress Has Always Been News
As “the dress” befuddled the Internet’s hive mind, our newsfeeds swelled. Tumblr and Buzzfeed, recognizing the viral power of a garment that appears gold and white to some but blue and black to others, got the freight train rolling. Soon, bastions of journalism such as the New York Times and Washington Post hopped on board. Experts in cognition assured us that…
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Beautiful Disaster
Hurricane Sandy, like many disasters today, was a media event. Striking images flashed across screens. The skyline divided into light and dark. Small groups of people huddled around power strips, vying to charge their phones and laptops. A photographer paused astride a bicycle in a deserted street. Uneven media coverage matched the uneven development of…
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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 …
