Commonplace Book

Two years ago, my friend, Vicki Lee wrote an article about how memes are created and circulated to elucidate the current social and political climate.

Jodi Dean, Images Without Viewers: Selfie Communism

The term is blurring together and so are our outfit choices. Ella and Kylie are joining in on mine and @pinkcoatselfies’s pink aesthetic.

“The Raptors’ Jurassic Park is a Racial Utopia” is a material example of the utopian that Web 2.0 espoused, but like the Internet, the culture of sports continues to be in negotiation and contention in discussions on race, masculinity, and sports.

“Everyone Is Canceled” looks at the implications of cancel culture and how it is linked to the ways that the attention economy is mobilized.

Inspired by Theresa and I’s discussion on embodiment and its relationship to the online persona of YouTubers, Lauren Fournier’s discussion of how sad girls “use their body and privilege to speak about larger issues” (654) hearkens back to the identity that dodie has established on the platform as a sad, white female musician on YouTube.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Stefanie Duguay’s initial contention of Ruby Rose opening up numerous possibilities for queer visibility online is not fully unpacked as the analysis concludes that “Rose’s Instagram selfies tend to be highly self-presentational, aligning with dominant discourses glorifying beauty, youthfulness, and affluence” [which] “mute discourses of alternative gender identity and sexuality through desexualized, proper, and aesthetically appealing self-presentations” (10). In doing so, Duguay erases attempts of making queer subjectivities visible and reinforces dominant discourses of representations of the self.

(via HerCampus)

John Berger’s Ways of Seeing attends to the treatment of visual culture and visual images as go-betweens in social transactions, as a repertoire of screen images or templates that structure our encounters with other human beings.