Alex Dobrenko

Invention is easily overrated, and implementation is often underrated.

Authenticity brings us to avatars. This might seem a strange connection: aren’t avatars, by nature, inauthentic? After all, avatars entail being someone other than yourself. But for many people, avatars are a vessel for more authentic self-expression.

Speaking with friends my age, usually the ones who were equally unathletic and unpopular and thus inundated with the content of the grotesque, we share a desire to actively re-sensitize ourselves to the tenderness of human experience.

In the aggregate, Andrew’s therapeutic language took on a sinister edge. It was communicating a commitment that was not real, a profound interest in the internality of women that was then used to manipulate them.

I am going to make the argument that the predominant form of the social web — that amalgam of blogging, Twitter, Facebook, forums, Reddit, Instagram — is an impoverished model for learning and research and that our survival as a species depends on us getting past the sweet, salty fat of “the web as conversation” and on to something more timeless,... See more