“Why do we want our characters to be innocent, as if we are innocent ourselves?”
Tag: Social Media
“Content” Erases Wall Between Fact & Fiction
“We’ve never had a period like this in modern American history,” lamented Governor DeSantis in April 2020, one with “such little new content.”
Public Thinker: Lara Putnam Wants You to Knock on Your Neighbor’s Door
“Campaigns matter in part because of who meets whom, about the social networks that are shaped by that campaign as well as shaping it.”
The Melting of the American Mind
Figuring out how people became fascists was the aim of Adorno and his colleagues’ 1950 study, The Authoritarian Personality. Has the answer changed?
The Ten Thousand Things
“I am supposed to be writing this essay, ostensibly on technology, but not for the first time, I believe I am unable to write; and not writing, doubt that I will I ever write again.”
Ethnographic Fictions: Talking with Megha Majumdar
Anthropology’s attention to the granular texture of someone’s life is a beautiful training for being a fiction writer.
Can Free Assembly Survive the Internet?
When the internet is in everything, its problems are everywhere.
Let’s Polarize Together
Humans can adapt to almost anything. So if social media forces us into permanently hostile camps, we will learn to stop seeing any other way.
Episode 3: Societies Online
What kind of social space are we inhabiting when we’re online? How do practices like data collection, data brokering, and surveillance underwrite the “free” services we enjoy?
Episode 2: Individuals Online
What exactly are we doing when we’re spending time online? Who profits from our presence there?
“The Culture of Narcissism” @40—and Counting
What if today’s self-centered world was born decades before digital media, as part of a much longer transformation of American society?
Public Thinker: Kevin Gannon Sets the Record Straight
A professor of history at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa, and the ...
The Hipster
It happens every year. Besides the “Best of” lists that heave into view as early as late November, there are the conspicuous “Worst of” lists. Contrary to their tone, these lists also itemize the ...
What I Learned on Medieval Twitter
Most of the people I follow on Twitter are medievalists, even though I’m not a medievalist myself. Far from it: my research focuses on the 20th and 21st ...
Public Thinker: Jo Livingstone on the Critic’s Voice
As a graduate student, Jo Livingstone realized early that an ...
Public Thinker: Siva Vaidhyanathan on Facebook and Other “Antisocial” Media
Siva Vaidhyanathan has built a career as a media studies and communications ...
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 ...
Anna Biller on Classic Films and Twitter Feminisms
To date, the independent filmmaker Anna Biller has tweeted somewhere in the ...
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 ...
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 ...