I feel like that will only change when the way people view writing on the internet period changes. ‘Sad Girl Twitter’ and Alt-Lit exist because they are types of writing that only exist on the internet and are only popular because of the internet. And for somebody like Jonathan Franzen who denies th…
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Quotes tagged ‘The internet’
By my count, there is still only one overnight celebrity who has managed to maintain a universal post-fame approval rating in the Internet age. That would be Harambe, who both 1) was a gorilla and therefore did not use Snapchat, and 2) is dead, so can’t spoil his web-free legacy by throwing feces or…
— Jay Willis, gq.com
The Bone Saga is a gentle-if-depressing reminder that everyone on the planet would be instantly betrayed by their browser history if they were to become suddenly, wildly famous. Bone is not much different than any Reddit commenter, DM slider, or Tinder swiper who has said something stupid and forget…
— Jay Willis, gq.com
Bone’s apologies seemed appropriately remorseful, but I feel for him, too. The Internet made him famous, but it acted as though he had invited that scrutiny, and it refused to rest until it fulfilled its solemn duty to destroy him.
— Jay Willis, gq.com
No matter how advanced and polished these platforms are, once users get their hands on it, the platform will trend toward shit.
One of Gawker’s most cherished tags was ‘How Things Work,’ a rubric that applied to posts revealing the sausage-making, the secret ways that power manifests itself. The phrase has a children’s book feel to it, bringing to mind colorful illustrations of animals in human work clothes building houses o…
It’s difficult to recall now, but at Gawker’s founding there was a sense that the internet was a free space, where anything can be said. An island off the mainland, where people could be themselves. Where writers could say things that would get you fired in an instant from a print publication. Where…
We’re losing a lot of people because of the internet. We have to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that internet up in some ways. Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of sp…
It is the absence of action from our lives that is rendering us incapable of being able to form an individual human being with traits that inspire, and take us on a journey towards self improvement.
It’s because we are so overwhelmed with individualized experiences of success on the internet, bombarded with the same examples of exceptions, that it leaves us feeling craving inspiration and stories to devour, rather than digest and metabolize. Just like food for our bodies, these words and sounds…
I am tired of the internet culture of just talking about things; human beings are still the same. We’re bombarded with so many intellectual arguments in the forms of quotes, articles, pictures, videos, podcasts; so much good information out there. And we’re evolving into beings who forget to process…
Online, we don’t have access to social cues. There’s no one on the receiving end of our jabs and tirades and vitriol. All we see are words on a screen in a text box. Empathy is null and void. Sometimes, I write things down that I think and feel and post them on the internet. Maybe you like to cook f…
Maybe people are just shitty. Or maybe it’s the internet’s fault. Or maybe people are just shitty and it’s the internet’s fault.
So the only thing we can do is to continue to demand that these services provide what we think we need, the 'we' being both individual and collective, and keep paying attention to the way they have structural problems in doing so. Whether that's algorithm or editorial acumen or yellow journalism, th…
The funny thing about clickbait as an idea is it's basically shorthand for: People really wanted to read this. Writing a really juicy headline to get people to read it, whether you got the substance or not, is not new to BuzzFeed and Upworthy. Is that gaming the algorithm? Was the algorithm of the p…
One of the things I found really interesting about Twitter Trends is that they'll weight tweets or hashtags that appear across different clusters of people that aren't connected to each other on Twitter higher than a lot of activity that happens in a densely connected cluster of people. You can imag…
It's in some ways a very old problem. NBC has to decide what's acceptable at 8 p.m. And they do that within some guidance of what the FCC says, but mostly they're working within those barriers, and deciding what they think their audience will accept, what they think their moral compass is, what thei…
Facebook, and every other large social-networking and information-aggregation company, both convenes and intervenes. Indeed, it convenes in order to intervene. The platform is the conversation. To fully analyze online social dynamics, one has to attend not only to the tension between the group and t…
By putting email and Twitter in our smart phones and attaching them to our bodies so that something vibrates every time we are mentioned, summoned, or pinged, we turn a potentially empowering asynchronous technology into a falsely synchronous one.
Instead of our offloading time-intensive tasks to our machines, our machines keep us humans working at their pace, or the pace of the companies on the other end of our network connections. Thanks to the Internet, we travel more on business, not less, we work at all hours on demand, and we spend our…