“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.”
Tag: Social Media
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.
The Great LOLCat Massacre
What makes cats so useful as an alphabet for the literature of the web?
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...