I have two articles out this week. The first is in a special issue of The Information Society on “the Death, Afterlife and Immortality of Bodies and Data.”
The second is from my summer internship with the Social Media Collective at MSR. The article is based on my work in the extreme body modification community, and talks about how issues of stigma and marginalization play out online.
So here is the deal. I’m a person. I’m not just a ‘girl on the internet.’ I am not comfortable with you remarking on my breasts. I am not comfortable with you implying that you’d like to have sex with me. And I don’t appreciate you rating my looks against my girlfriends in candid photos. While I can’t stop these comments and questions from arising when they pop up on random blogs across the web, I can stand up and say that I won’t accept being talked to in this manner any more. I’m not simply going to ignore you; I’m going to call you out and tell you that you’re being inappropriate.
The religion of information is another superstition, another distorting totalism, another counterfeit deliverance. In some ways the technology is transforming us into brilliant fools. In the riot of words and numbers in which we live so smartly and so articulately, in the comprehensively quantified existence in which we presume to believe that eventually we will know everything, in the expanding universe of prediction in which hope and longing will come to seem obsolete and merely ignorant, we are renouncing some of the primary human experiences. We are certainly renouncing the inexpressible. The other day I was listening to Mahler in my library. When I caught sight of the computer on the table, it looked small.
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inspired by the work of SAUL BASS, ART GOODMAN and DAVE NAGATA.
hitchcock typeface by MATT TERICH. tumblr theme by MATTHEW BUCHANAN.
