Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
illustrated the differing meanings of “public” or publicness that emerges in the narratives of cruisers and others.
Shaka McGlotten • Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality
The promise of the literature of self-improvement—that one can imagine one’s self anew and then invent the life one imagines, that one can act on “the before” to create “the after”—demands the sacrifice of the present moment.
Micki McGee • Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life
The Columbia professor Jonathan Crary argues that today’s representational culture results from a nineteenth-century shift away from defining “perception” as “presence” and toward “attention.” Rather than recognizing our experience as immersive, our discourse and technologies evolved to emphasize the filtering out of stimuli in favor of some
... See moreExit the supersensorium
Social structures and individual identities are mutually constitutive: interconnected to such an extent that changes in the former necessarily produce changes in the later, and, some would argue, vice versa.
Micki McGee • Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life
In any case, I stopped believing that "theo-ry" had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn't the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?
- Elif Batuman,
The Possessed
This imbalance induces a state of passivity: We consume what the feeds recommend to us without engaging too deeply with the material. We also adapt the way we present ourselves online to its incentives.
Kyle Chayka • Filterworld
audience, and the producers of the program are all brought into contact with one another, mirroring one another's longings for illicit sex, punitive retribution, and intimacy's failure.