Em Dash Reclamation and Redemption Arcs
A recurring theme as technology has changed celebrity is that content output goes up and production value goes down. The production value of a Kardashian social media post is orders of magnitude lower than the production value of an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Rex Woodbury • The Business of Fame: 1920-2020
Years before Instagram influencers and TikTok stars, these young creatives invented an entirely new model of fame, luring in audiences not yet trained to spend hours of their days absently flipping through the internet.
Mark Bergen • Like, Comment, Subscribe
Millennial commenters express a desire to rewind to that era of their lives; younger posters wish that they could have lived through it in the first place. Like “Home,” these other relics hark back to an unencumbered life outside of our performative digital panopticon. As a bit of internet-vernacular wisdom puts it, “I am cringe but I am free.”