An anonymous confession. A recent study reported by The New York Times suggests that people are people with or without Facebook. People without Facebook have mood swings; people with Facebook have mood swings and access to thousands of pictures of people they might only kind of know. Examining the study, Benedict Carey explains how “heavy […]
New Parties for the Age of Social Media
Who actually flies to Vegas for a bachelor party? I’m not being mean or judgmental here. I really want to know. Who has that kind of money to spend on a friend? I mean, if you’re living in LA and Vegas is only 4 car hours away, make like The Hangover and have a good (and […]
The Philosopher from the 1800s Who Talked About Social Media
Long before Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, there lived a man in 19th-century Denmark who foreshadowed them all. His name was Søren Kierkegaard. We recognize him as a philosopher and a pugilistic theologian. Plus, the guy could tell a story like nobody’s business. And in one of his stories, he all but prophesies the future soul […]
Another Week Ends: Remembering Billy Graham, Masculinity, The Midlife of Brendan Fraser, Arendt on Auden, Antisocial Churchsoundboardmen, Norwegian Grace, and (More) Technological Law
1. First up, Tullian Tchividjian posted a reflection on his remarkable grandfather, the late Billy Graham: The last real conversation I had with him will forever live in my memory. We were sitting in his bedroom. His body was frail, but his mind was still sharp. He talked to me about how hard it was […]
The Girls of Whitehaven: Love and Friend Requests in Cyber Space
In 2009 I was invited to join “Facebook.” I already knew all about it, because my best friend from high school had gone to Harvard, where I had visited her and had seen it in 1974, in her freshman room. Back then, “Facebook” was paper and had all the Radcliffe girls listed in it. It was mostly a catalog of pictures. […]
Alternative Faith: Click Crack, Fake News, and Good News
America has a Tweeter in Chief. The response is a seemingly unending stream of Facebook sites and posts and comments and likes and friending and unfriending. Drudge had a record month in January — over 1,000,000,000 hits. Is “SEE-CLICK” rewiring our collective reality? Apple’s Tim Cook seems to think so: “We are going through this period of time […]
Jurassic World and Facebook Elegies
Sitting in a breezy movie theater waiting for Jurassic World to start, my friend looked up from his Facebok timeline to ask me a question. We had been talking earlier about the devastating death of a friend and classmate, and in the last hour it had started to dominate our News Feed. “Dude, are we […]
Empathy and True Emotion in The Facebook Mood Experiment
A couple weeks ago, it was revealed that back in January 2012, Facebook ran a week long experiment on a small subset of unknowing users that has been dubbed “The Facebook Mood Experiment.” Facebook altered the status updates that these unwitting users saw and skewed them either more negatively (i.e. they saw more updates with […]
The Selfie on the Mount
Instagram enhances Facebook’s most essential quality. Facebook allows you to keep in touch with old “friends,” but keeping in touch means subjecting yourself to climate-change rants from that girl who failed biology in high school, college football highlight videos from that guy who never went to college, and (if you’re friends with me) shameless plugging of […]
Facebook, Politics, and True Forgiveness
There has been a new trend amongst my friends on Facebook that is truly terrifying. Somebody will go on another’s profile and scroll all the way back to their middle school days to find the most embarrassing pictures/videos/status updates they can find, they comment or like it, and then it appears on all of your […]
Another Week Ends: Amy Chua's Three Traits for Success, Nietzsche's Subversion of Atheism, Why Fun Is Fun, The Eighth-Grade Ubermensch, Dostoevsky's Internet Anxiety and Lena Dunham's Eden
1. What happens when you combine an unshakeable superiority complex with deep insecurity? Probably a nervous breakdown in mid-life, or Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan. But Amy Chua (of “Tiger Mother” fame) asks us to guess again. The real answer is… success. For those unfamiliar with her work on hyper-controlling parenting (using that adjective as value-neutrally as possible), it’s […]