trying on a metaphor
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
One Nice Bug Per Day
JBB: An Artblog!
Sweet Seals For You, Always
★
wallacepolsom
@theartofmadeline
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Origami Around
Cosmic Funnies
styofa doing anything
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
AnasAbdin
todays bird
Kiana Khansmith
if i look back, i am lost
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
seen from South Africa
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@blnchr
Zhang Xiao aka Zhangxiao aka 張曉 aka 张晓 (Chinese, b. 1981, Yantai, Shandong Province, China) - From Shanxi series, 2009 Photography (Shanxi is a series dedicated to the ceremonies and celebrations of the eponymous province of Shanxi in the north-west of China for the annual She Huo Festival.)
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I think about this once a day.
Kidnapping Blues (1982), Shinpei Asai
some articles i enjoyed recently (faves are bolded)
the genesis of blame, london review of books
the narcissism of queer influencer activists, gawker
there’s no moral imperative to be miserable, james greig
the cult of the imperfect, umberto eco
susanna clarke’s world of interiors, the new yorker
your camera roll contains a masterpiece, the new yorker
are you a baby? a litmus test, haley nahman on substack
prestige television and the moral life, article & podcast ep
how tv became respectable without getting better, current affairs
the cultural revisionism history, gawker
have we forgotten how to read critically?, dame magazine
found images, real life mag
nostalgia for nostalgia, real life mag
on internet & technology
google search is dying, dkb on substack
what lies beneath, real life mag
how the tiktok algorithm figures out your deepest desires, the wall street journal
the great offline, real life mag
nameless feeling, real life mag
i’m not there, real life mag
the age of social media: a reading list
note: all hyperlinked texts are either open-access academic works or public-facing articles, & most other texts are accessible through various pdf-hosting websites.
books
the age of surveillance capitalism by shoshanna zuboff (2019)
the burnout society by byung-chul han, tr. erik butler (2015)
control: digitality as cultural logic by seb franklin (2015)
dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness by simone browne (2015)
the death algorithm and other digital dilemmas by roberto simanowski, tr. jefferson chase (2018)
the end of forgetting: growing up with social media by kate eichhorn (2019)
in the swarm: digital politics by byung-chul han, tr. erik butler (2012)
the politics of dating apps: gender, sexuality, and emergent publics in urban china by lik sam chan (2021)
the transparency society by byung-chul han, tr. erik butler (2015)
weaving the dark web: legitimacy on freenet, tor, and i2p by robert gehl (2018)
articles
ambivalent influencers: feeling rules and the affective practice of anxiety in social media influencer work by mari lehto (2021)
capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, and racism in the age of digital capitalism and digital labour by christian fuchs (2017)
children are our future: resistance, addiction and the digital natives by rob horning (2010)
#dadtribe: performing sharenting labour to commercialise involved fatherhood by mario campana, astrid van den bossche, and bryoney miller (2020)
disintegrated bodies from cyborg microcelebrities to capital flow: a post-phenomenological investigation of disembodiment by riad salameh (2021)
the drama of metrics: status, spectacle, and resistance among youtube drama creators by angèle christin and rebecca lewis (2021)
#familygoals: family influencers, calibrated amateurism, and justifying young digital labor by crystal abidin (2017)
fragments on microcelebrity by rob horning (2012)
imagined affordances of instagram and the fantastical authenticity of female gulf-arab social media influencers by zoe hurley (2019)
improbable curators: analysing nostalgia, authorship and audience on tumblr microblogs by dinu gabriel munteanu (2017)
instagram use, instamums, and anxiety in mothers of young children by mara moujaes and diarmuid verrier (2020)
micromicrocelebrity: branding babies on the internet by crystal abidin (2015)
power through the algorithm? participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious by david beer (2009)
“running the numbers”: modes of microcelebrity labor in queer women’s self-representation on instagram and vine by stefanie duguay (2019)
selling brands while staying “authentic”: the professionalization of instagram influencers by loes van driel, delia dumitrica (2020)
seo and the disappearing self by rob horning (2010)
social media as masochism by rob horning (2016)
social media is not self-expression by rob horning (2012)
speaking to no one by rob horning (2017)
verbal venting in the social web: effects of anonymity and group norms on aggressive language use in online comments by leonie rösner and nicole c. krämer (2016)
vlogging parlance by sophie bishop (2018)
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Tadashi Ohashi, onion illustration for Kikkoman soy sauce, 1970s. From Graphis 1973.
KAZUO KAWASAKI Artificial Heart Jinkou-shinzou (1998)
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The Garden Book, 1984
As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
“Nobody is superior, nobody is inferior, but nobody is equal either. People are simply unique, incomparable. You are you, I am I. I have to contribute my potential to life; you have to contribute your potential to life. I have to discover my own being; you have to discover your own being.”
— Osho
—Jenny Odell, from How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Melville House, 2019)
[Text ID: In my opinion, this kind of hyper-accelerated expression on social media is not exactly helpful (not to mention the huge amount of value it produces for Facebook). It’s not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger. Obviously these feelings are warranted, but their expression on social media so often feels like firecrackers setting off other firecrackers in a very small room that soon gets filled with smoke. Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for us, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement. Meanwhile, media companies continue churning out deliberately incendiary takes, and we’re so quickly outraged by their headlines that we can’t even consider the option of not reading and sharing them.]
People are waking up to the harms of the internet, but we still can't escape it. We need to change how we define the problem.
As Yasha Levine writes in his book “Surveillance Valley,” the internet was never meant to be a place friendly to the average user – it was developed by the US military to spy on people during wars, and then used to spy on Americans at home too. Some of Google’s initial funding came from grants from US spy agencies. When the infrastructure of the internet was sold off by the US government to private companies, the people who stood to profit off that privatization funded magazines, advertisements, and lobbying to reframe the internet from a surveillance tool to one that could liberate us culturally. As detailed by Levine, Louis Rossetto – the founder of Wired Magazine, the biggest megaphone for evangelizing the new, privatized internet in the 1990s – was an Ayn Rand fan who believed the internet would come to replace the need for a government.
[...]
If the internet is somewhat like a factory, perhaps we should treat it like one. In 2014, the artist Laurel Ptak created a manifesto called Wages for Facebook in which she argued that Facebook should pay users for their content:
“They say it’s friendship. We say it’s unwaged work. With every like, chat, tag or poke our subjectivity turns them a profit. They call it sharing. We call it stealing.”
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Man I was so motivated to start a career a couple of years back and now I don’t give a shit about any sort of professional work.
like what even is a career in this generation when everyone is so obviously replaceable and expendable? is a career even desirable to this generation when work spaces are often so plastic and disingenious. Overworked, underpaid, understaffed for no discernible reason other than fuck you, Totally Not Mandatory Social Drinks™, having a Chat™ with the manager, micromanagement, mismanagement, incoherant management, galaxy-brain restructuring that just makes your work harder, passive-aggression, regular aggression, unsocialable hours without adequate compensation, That Guy™ , 2-hour work commutes, constantly being put in competition for promotions, or to just keep your job, and much much more. the common workplace is diseased.
and with corporate meddling being what it is, even jobs that seemingly have more freedom like youtubers and twitch streamers are become more and more sterilized and monitored. youtubers sound more exasperated in my opinion. Quips about the youtube algorithm are more frequent. there’s a tiredness to it all not too dissimilar to the monday morning grunts from an office worker. like a collective cry for help. that coupled with the toxicity of mainstream social media and the inexplicable need to constantly be available to your audience for Engagement™™™ (so much so that creators often have to take long breaks for their health) and it gives off the idea that the whole youtube/streamer career isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either. there doesn’t seem to be an escape from corporate interests infesting and sucking the life and creativity out of everything this shit sucks man
“Love is not a category of relationships. Nor is it something ‘out there’ that you can fall into, or — years later — out of,” explains Barbara Fredrickson, PhD, in her book Love 2.0. “Love blossoms virtually anytime two or more people — even strangers — connect over a shared positive emotion.” Fredrickson, who teaches in the psychology department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, calls these moments of connection “positivity resonance.” This expansive, science-based approach to love offers us many chances to experience it in the course of a single day. While it’s not easy to set aside the Western idea that true love must be exclusive, lasting, and intimate, we have a lot to gain by letting it go. That 90-second conversation you had with the stranger this morning while walking your dog? If there was eye contact, a sense of connection, and mutual respect — that’s love. Whenever we exchange smiles or friendly gestures with strangers, or take a little extra time to have warm exchanges with people we see every day, those “micro-moments of positivity” change us at the biological level. Princeton University neuroscientist Uri Hasson, PhD, a pioneer in neural mirroring (also known as “brain coupling”), examined brain scans of subjects in conversation. What he found was surprising, Fredrickson writes. “Far from being isolated to one or two brain areas, really clicking with someone else appears to be a whole brain dance in a fully mirrored room.” In good communication, she continues, “two individuals come to feel a single, shared emotion … distributed across their two brains.” The vagus nerve is also involved in forging personal connections. It stimulates the facial muscles necessary for making eye contact and synchronizing our expressions with others; it even helps the tiny muscles in the inner ear better track another voice amid background noise. We appear to be programmed to harmonize with fellow humans. Micro-moments of positivity resonance also improve our health, she notes. “People who experience more caring connections with others have fewer colds and lower blood pressure, and they less often succumb to heart disease and stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, and some cancers.” When our hearts are open, love happens. All day.”
— Jessie Sholl, Love is Everywhere
