June 2011
30 posts
“The old posters are all faded… People make fun of hope and change.”
—Barack Obama
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“To use a theatrical metaphor, these new forms of communication provide a stage on which we can each create our own characters, hidden behind a fourth wall of tweets and status updates, of texts and pings. This illusory state of detachment can become addictive as we isolate ourselves a safe distance from the cruelty of our fleshly lives, where we are flawed, powerless and inconsequential.”
—Zach Pontz, “The Costs of Our Digital Reality” (More Intelligent Life)
“Narratives that disclose news or express opinion used to be called ‘articles’ or ‘columns’ but are now universally referred to as ‘content.’ It is as though all our words have become gauzy filler material, the pale fluff inside decorative throw pillows. Newspapers used to give readers what we thought they needed. Now, in desperation, we give readers what we think they want. And what we seem to think they want is happy, glitzy, ditzy stuff, which is why in recent years newspapers across the country have been replacing sections named, say, ‘Viewpoint’ with online Web destinations named, say, ‘Wheee!’ featuring multiplatform, user-interactive content-sharing with clickable portals to ‘Lolcats.’”
—Gene Weingarten (via washingtonpoststyle)
“This is the Internet, where we screw each other over for a jolt of satisfaction.”
—LulzSec slogan
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“For much of my life, I wanted to be other people; here was the central dilemma, the reason, I believe, for my creative stasis. I was always falling short of people’s expectations: my immigrant parents’, my Indian relatives’, my American peers’, above all my own. The writer in me wanted to edit myself.”
—Jhumpa Lahiri, “Trading Stories” (The New Yorker)
