Saved by Mike Renaud
The Downward Spiral: Persona (Part I)
I’m extremely wary of the cult of contemporary self-making, and the fact that it’s become an expected part of life in the attention economy for middle-class workers.
From the college essay – the first time many of us are required to tell a selling story of ourselves in the service of social capital – to the dating website to Twitter or Instagram,... See more
From the college essay – the first time many of us are required to tell a selling story of ourselves in the service of social capital – to the dating website to Twitter or Instagram,... See more
Tara Isabella Burton • Self-Made ft. Tara Isabella Burton: The History & Future of Self Curation
Eichhorn uses the potent term “content capital”—a riff on Pierre Bourdieu’s “cultural capital”—to describe the way in which a fluency in posting online can determine the success, or even the existence, of an artist’s work.
“Cultural producers who, in the past, may have focused on writing books or producing films or making art must now also spend... See more
“Cultural producers who, in the past, may have focused on writing books or producing films or making art must now also spend... See more
Kyle Chayka • How the Internet Turned Us Into Content Machines
The idea of being a poser, of being driven to do things because it’ll look good and for the satisfaction of knowing someone thinks it looks good, not for the satisfaction of actually doing the thing. Could it be this is more prevalent today, because more eyes are on us all the time with the internet? Because we watch so much TV, we start thinking
... See moreThat labor amounts to constant self-promotion in the form of cheap trend-following, ever-changing posting strategies, and the nagging feeling that what you are really doing with your time is marketing, not art. Under the tyranny of algorithmic media distribution, artists, authors — anyone whose work concerns itself with what it means to be human —... See more
Rebecca Jennings • Everybody Has to Self-Promote Now. Nobody Wants To.
“French social theorist Jean Baudrillard has this concept called the hyperreality. It’s rooted in simulacrum (Latin for “copying shit”) and follows this rule: the “faker” something seems, the more “real” everything else around it seems to be in comparison, even if this perception is a false one.
Baudrillard suggests that in order to deal with our
... See more