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Re-calling the Modem World: The Dial-Up History Of Social Media

Where did the Internet come from? And in order to answer that ques­tion, you would have to have a pret­ty clear idea of what you mean when you say the Internet.” I sus­pect that if we were to poll every­body in the room, we would have a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent, some­times con­tra­dic­to­ry, some­times incom­pat­i­ble, some­times over­lap­ping, def­i­n­i­tions of the Internet.”

Collusion episode 3: Food

Food has always been tight­ly inter­twined with cul­ture and iden­ti­ty. As a result, it’s also been a com­mon tar­get of colo­nial­ism. Colonizers under­stood that by wip­ing out peo­ple’s food tra­di­tions, it would be eas­i­er to wipe out their ori­gins, their iden­ti­ty, and their his­to­ry. This kind of trend isn’t only in the past, though. In many areas of the world, dietary habits are chang­ing, food inequal­i­ty is rife, and some­how both obe­si­ty and hunger are on the rise on a glob­al scale.

Virality, Uncreativity and the End of Self-Expression

With social media, the com­pelling oppor­tu­ni­ties for self-expression out­strip the sup­ply of things we have to con­fi­dent­ly say about our­selves. The demand for self-expression over­whelms what we might dredge up from the inside, from our true selves. So the self that we’re express­ing in social media has to be posit­ed else­where. We start to bor­row from the net­work. We start to bor­row from imag­ined future selves that we can project. We start to bor­row from the media them­selves and from oth­er kinds of con­tent cir­cu­lat­ing there that we can now con­sti­tute our­selves with.

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