February 2012
Facebook division of labor and the rewired society
I’m reading through the summary of findings of this Pew survey of Facebook users. (It is based on phone polling, so caveat emptor.) The point…
Google and the Production of Curiosity
Google, then, is the reification of the general intellect. It manages to take human curiosity and turn it into capital.
January 2012
Authenticity Issues and the New Intimacies
The social-media companies have largely succeeded in persuading users of their platforms' neutrality. What we fail to see is that these new identities are no less contingent and dictated to us then the ones circumscribed by tradition; only now the constraints are imposed by for-profit companies in explicit service of gain.
Data Self Redux
I think the logical extension of the data self -- the self that is secure with itself only to the extent that it is constituted in social media as manipulatable data -- will be for Twitter to come preloaded with plausible friends, Facebook preloaded with life experiences, or at least preordained slots of experiences a user is supposed to have.
Existential Liberalism As Ideological Fog
This, from “Reflections on the Call” by Leon de Mattis, in Communization and Its Discontents (pdf), is a good point: It is certain that the…
Everyone’s a modernist
Irving Howe’s 1967 Commentary essay “The Culture of Modernism” (here’s a gated link for all you Commentary subscribers in the audience) is the sort of…
The Rise of the Data Self
Freud is out, Facebook et al. is in. For example, we try things that seem self-expressive using media that can give us quantified feedback, and only when the results come back do we decide whether what was expressed was "true".
Facebook’s False Frame of Reference
Using Facebook made me feel acutely narcissistic, not because it got me to boast about myself, but because it brought home to me just how much I expect other people's lives to revolve around me.
The new strategies of desire
The Economist‘s holiday double issue a few weeks ago had an article about 1950s motivational-research guru Ernest Dichter (author of The Strategy of Desire) that…
Assorted thoughts on social mobility
Economic mobility is a different thing from social mobility, as any number of nouveau-riche tales of ostracized woe can testify to. Measuring whether one goes…
