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 ...
Tag: Internet
“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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
#Storytelling: The Art of the Micro-narrative
For four days this March, as part of Twitter’s second Fiction Festival, writers from around the globe tweeted works of fiction in installments of no more than 140 characters. This isn’t the first ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
What’s So Social About Social Media?
Social media is possibly the worst thing that’s ever happened to media scholars. I’m not referring to the phenomenon of Facebook, Twitter, and other brand-name-as-verb online platforms—experienced ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...