2022s
“To be very online is to be in a toxic collective solitude where everyone is battling their own demons in their own infinite echo chamber, their own confirmation-bias machine. I felt as if I’d broken free of all that for a while. Solitude is good and valuable in the right proportion, but so is connection. Ideas might grow in silence but they can’t thrive without other people.”
— The Farthest Shore by Alex Roddie 📚
While enjoying Winterwatch on the BBC, I got to wondering why summer is the only season that doesn’t get a Watch. And it, turns out, there are two reasons.
“I also saw someone else describe NFTs as “content-free DRM” and reader, I howled.”
This is one of the more thoughtful takes I’ve seem on dealing with the problem of online anonymity without ending it: Curtailing anonymity is a first step to reducing online abuse
The Undeath of the Author
(With apologies to Barthes.)
“But social media has tilted things so that books by contemporary authors—let alone essays—are no longer portable worlds that awaken when a reader enters and slumber when one leaves. Today, the author is not dead until the author is actually dead. In the meantime, every published piece of writing is treated as the beginning of a conversation—or worse, a workshop piece—by some readers, each of whom feels entitled to a bespoke response.”
The masocism of social media
“When was the last time you were out in public and felt actively rejected by someone you felt familiar with? Chances are it’s such a rare occurrence you might struggle to even recall one, but when we move online, every minutiae of our digital existence — every unfollow, dry response and glaring ‘Read’ receipt — step in to recreate that rare feeling of rejection in a form that feels documented for your own torture; its meaning unequivocal.”
“Polarised thinking may make people feel comfortable in their righteousness; but it’s not a way of solving a problem.”
“If you climb a mountain but don’t Instagram the view from the summit, have you even climbed it? I wanted the answer to be yes - knew it to be - but, somehow, incredibly, I didn’t always believe it. I let the impulse crash over me, hating it, and ignored the twitch for my phone.”
— The Farthest Shore by Alex Roddie 📚
