Digital forms are best illuminated by cultural criticism, which uses the tools of art and literary theory to make sense of the Internet’s glorious illusion: that the Internet is life. Because.
I began to think that melancholy was a dialect that only some people knew-or could even hear-and in my conversations, I sought these people out.
I wondered if all of us churchgoers were just exhausted by grief. For the dying priest and us, I thought, “God” always refused to become glorious, instead stubbornly remaining plain, a headache, a sorrowful knot of language.
If beauty is only skin deep, look really, really hard.
As I sat alone at the computer hour after hour it seemed I was learning “computers.” In fact, I was learning culture.
Cruise through the gargantuan sites – YouTube, Amazon, Yahoo! – and it’s as though modernism never existed. Twentieth-century print design never existed. European and Japanese design never existed. The Web’s aesthetic might be called late-stage Atlantic City or early-stage Mall of America.
Tweets are not diseased rings of glitchy minds. They’re epigrams, aphorisms, maxims, dictums, taglines, captions, slogans, and adages. Some are art, some are commercial; these are forms with integrity.
As any American with children knows, our children have at least one bright, clear reason for being: to furnish subjects for digital photographs that can be corrected, cropped, captioned, organized, categorized, albumized, broadcast, turned into screen savers, and brandished on online social networks.