I’m now in a long-distance relationship. Part of our thing is to trade photos we take. They silently arrive, pulled from our pockets when we feel the vibration. I got one the other day from Oakland. It showed two goats, one a tiny baby, standing on a set of stairs next to some bright white birds. An urban farm. Perhaps I should have been thinking about all the technology that went into sending me that photo. The charged-couple device that could capture the light, the wireless networks, the way the device I was using was turning me into a bumbling idiot absorbed with the virtual instead of the REAL WORLD. But I didn’t. I thought about the hands that took the photo, fingers and the fingernails, then wrists and arms running up to shoulders and along the ridge there to the face hiding under a bonnet of curly locks. I saw her looking at farm animals and thinking of a home. That particular pile of bits wasn’t just a pile of bits. It was like bones, an intimation of a body and a place, a body in place. A story. Our messages carry with them the smudges and swipes, the tap-taptaps we use to make meanings. For transport, they are flattened and virtualized. Then it is up to us — as an act of imagination — to reinflate them. This relationship predates, well, everything.

Literary Writers and Social Media: A Response to Zadie Smith - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

This rebuttal to the Zadie Smith Facebook piece makes some good points, but the more personal concluding paragraphs are my favorite part.

(via maviswillsaveus)

Yes, yes.  The last parts especially, but the whole thing is pretty tremendous— though I suppose that’s because I’ve been having similar conversations to the whole “how our lives exist with/in the digital world” thing.

The part (in Zadie’s original article) about the imagined post of memorial struck extra hard with me, too.  Mainly because I’ve experienced the real deal first hand, a… let’s say an acquaintance of mine in high school died, oh what, two years ago (wow), but his facebook page, to this day!, is still posted upon, with posts very similarly vague and lacking in grammar and language— (not far off from “Sorry babes! Missin’ you! Hopin’ u iz with the Angles. I remember the jokes we used to have LOL! PEACE XXXXX” at all!.)  One phrase in particular stands out, posted many times by many different people— “drive slow, homie.”  What does that mean?  It’s an inside joke between these old friends, and they’re making it live forever on the internet.

I actually wrote an article about it last year.  But it’s still fresh, because the internet and the culture that spawned from it won’t let it go.  The wounds are always, perennially fresh with digital media and social networking.  Unless Facebook crashes and deletes all data, the deceased still exist.

Ahhh.  I don’t know how to go on.  It just sort of… weirds me out.  Make me feel vulnerable.

(via maviswillsaveus)

Notes

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