I don’t remember exactly when this dawned me — far too late, definitely — but I started enjoying sad/sappy movies a lot more when I let myself cry when the movie seemed to expect it of me instead thinking I was somehow beating the system or proving my superiority by resisting it.
Tag: robhorning
Predictive analytics and information camouflage – The New Inquiry
Ads lift us above the other people who are duped by them. That is part of how they persuade us. […] We are hailed by ads only under the pretense that we are observing someone else being hailed (someone who turns out to become us).
Predictive analytics and information camouflage – The New Inquiry
The New Inquiry: Comfortably Alone
Shyness had made me so deficient in empathic experience that I could only view social life in terms of risk rather than opportunity. The best way to manage that risk, I thought, was to be unapproachable but legibly fascinating at a distance, to present myself as an object to be read but with a message that’s inscrutable and fleeting, one that could convey the complexity of the real me without reducing it to something superficial. I could not get past the wish to broadcast my identity without having to interact with anyone.
Facebook, of course, caters to that desire.
The New Inquiry – SEO & the Disappearing Self
Social media structures communication between friends so that the responsibility for listening — inescapably built into earlier mediums that structured talk between friends as person-to-person — is modulated into a vaguer injunction to respond if and when you feel like it. Because status updates and the like are not addressed to anyone specific, they don’t generate an obligation in anyone specific to pay attention.
Mark Larson 