What of Twitter? “Brevity is the soul of wit,” Shakespeare’s Polonius says, issuing the greatest unintentional aphorism in literature: at the time, scholars say, the line meant merely that concision is the essence of useful[…]
When it finally sunk in that I’m not the next Nabokov, I got pretty depressed for a while. I started to wish that there was some magical place where a total lack of any discernible[…]
Pettiness often manifests itself as an outsize form of revenge — responding to mild slights by putting an absurd amount of energy into plotting meaningless reprisals. (One theory even claims this is how Donald Trump[…]
1. FB promised to be and, in many ways, has become a new public square. It was never private. The insistence that it was private and that our privacy has been violated leads people to[…]
It would be easy to assume, surveying the national scene, that pettiness is universally regarded as a bad thing. But in other corners of the culture, it’s experiencing a kind of renaissance. On black Twitter,[…]
The internet of the 1990s was a perfect canvas for alarmism: hard to define, easy to misunderstand, growing rapidly but not yet vital or even familiar to those most inclined to worry about it. But[…]
Before 1930, moving picture aspect ratios were all over the place. But mass distribution requires standardization, so influential filmmakers met in Hollywood that year to talk. They settled on the horizontal shot. Things pretty much[…]
Social platforms tend to refer to their customers in euphemistic, almost democratic terms: as “users” or “members of a community”. Their leaders are prone to statesmanlike posturing, and some, like Mark Zuckerberg, even seem to[…]
I doubt there has been an increase in anti-Semitism as much as there has been an increase in the permissibility of the expressions of anti-Semitism and its amplification by the tools of social media. A[…]
…the most significant way in which the Islamic State has exhibited its media savviness has been through its embrace of openness. Unlike al Qaeda, which has generally been methodical about organizing and controlling its terror[…]
