“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, January 2, 2014

Of Selfies

“The reason why you post so many photos of yourself and your close ones online is to ward off the disturbance of intimacy. Why did the violence happen off stage in Greek tragedy? To cordon us from it, or in fact to make it more intimate through the exploitation of our anxiety and imaginative identification.”

Discuss.

1 comment:

Nick Guetti said...

I've been talking about this with my "friends" (on FB), who mostly think I'm crazy.

Everyone talks about how great it is that social media tech has made us all so much more "connected", but in fact the reason why that stuff feels good is because it increases the aesthetic distance between us. This is why "friends" are something you can window-shop for. I think we're trying to romanticize ourselves into total isolation and calling it "connection" to make it seem like we're not doing that.