This essay is the next chapter of my ongoing research into critical internet culture. The previous part was finished in September 2015 when I wrapped up Social Media Abyss, which was published in English by Polity Press in June 2016, with translations into Italian, German, Turkish, and Chinese.
See “Facebook’s ‘context collapse’: Massive drop in personal sharing,” Net Imperative, April 14, 2016 →. There is growing evidence that first-hand personal materials are no longer shared by Joe and Joanna Sixpack. Nicolas Carr calls this “context restauration”: “When people start backing away from broadcasting intimate details about themselves, it’s a sign that they’re looking to reestablish some boundaries in their social lives, to mend the walls that social media has broken … They are shifting their role from that of actor to that of producer or publisher or aggregator.” “Context collapse and context restoration,” Rough Type (blog), April 10, 2016 →.
Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation (New York: Penguin, 2015).
When terms or symptoms are inflated, they lose their meaning. This might be the case with addiction. If entire societies are addicted, the term loses its ability to create differences and it is time to search for alternative concepts. A possible new term could be “stickyness.” Julia Roberts on social media: “It’s kind of like cotton candy: It looks so appealing, and you just can’t resist getting in there, and then you just end up with sticky fingers, and it lasted an instant.”
See the announcement for the launch of the Unlike Us network, July 2011 →
A variation on the title (“What’s On a Man’s Mind”) of a popular drawing of Freud with a naked lady worked into his forehead. A poster of the drawing decorated my teenage bedroom in 1976–77.
Wendy Chun, “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” Grey Room 18 (Winter 2004): 26–51. All quotes from Chun that appear below are taken from this essay.
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation),” first published in La Pensée 151, June 1970. English translation available in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001).