How to Read the Internet

The affordances of different types of online space change how information is produced, circulated, and remembered across platforms. What happens when platforms enable the archival of information? What happens when they encourage collective experiences versus personal, inward-facing ones?

Sometimes online communities make wikis or YouTube explainers to keep track of certain storylines, but many seem to persist without ever being recorded. Shared memory is often maintained in ways that don’t translate to the readable archives produced by print-based textual tradition. On some level, this feels paradoxical, like the internet should ac... See more

As the realm of virtual information complexifies, it is increasingly difficult to collectively experience, let alone agree on concrete descriptions of events. The platforms we use to communicate often lack archival affordances, optimizing instead for the nonstop production of new content. So context collapses and signifiers empty their meaning. Whe... See more

There’s power in signaling insider knowledge to outsiders, so naturally we see the memetic propagation of idiomatic lore artifacts beyond the bounds of where they actually convey meaning. But as time goes on, their density and alienation from more universal lexicons makes it hard for even the ‘in-group’ to keep track of this internal meaning. It’s ... See more