Saved by Jack Sun and
Speaking in Stickers — Real Life
Emoji respond to the impossibility of truly knowing the other’s affect through text; in so doing, they become the new texture of that impossibility.
Mack Hagood • Fidelity Angst — Real Life
Sixian added
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
Libby Marrs • How to Read the Internet
sari and added
maybe here, we do have an aesthetic counter to the wallflower non-style of Big Tech: a raging messy semiotic meltdown of radicalizing (if absurdist) meme culture where the only ideological no-go zone is the liberal center. Key here is that most of this activity is happening under the guise of avatars, pseudonyms, and collectively run social media a
... See moreCaroline Busta • The Internet Didn’t Kill Counterculture—you Just Won’t Find It on Instagram
Language can contain an entire world, revealing its speakers’ history, values, or pathologies. It can also be obfuscating, diversionary, slippery. Chattiness, with its personality-driven appeals to familiarity, can conceal or elide false promises, banality, emptiness, controversy, and the context of its own existence
Anna Wiener • The Age of Chat
Keely Adler added
TikTok, with its emphasis on short, entrancing content, makes physical estrangement the focus of the viewing experience
TikTok Face — Real Life
Kalyani T added
Emoji once stood in for facial expressions; now we are moving in the other direction
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
Libby Marrs • How to Read the Internet
sari added
When judgment, or narrative come up in the context of digital networks, the conversation often goes one of two directions. The first is to identify the lack of common context on social media, nothing the confusion and contention that emerges from this kind of discourse. The second is to note that knowledge communities tend to cloister themselves on... See more
Calvin Hutcheon • Enchanted — Working With Lore P2 Discursive Landscapes
Sarah Drinkwater added
- "To exist on platforms is to be subject to this kind of continual identity reconstitution, to fluidity. Self-branding attempts to hide this inevitability by claiming agency over it, as though by choosing to turn our identity into capital, it becomes a free choice. Self-obfuscation, on the other hand, effectively embraces it through a kind of acce... See more
Emma Stamm • Who Can It Be Now — Real Life
Brian Sholis added