Highbrow Magazine - status update https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/status-update en Celebrity Deaths in the Age of Google and Facebook https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/4028-celebrity-deaths-age-google-and-facebook <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/news-features" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">News &amp; Features</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Mon, 06/02/2014 - 10:26</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/3mayaanglou.jpg?itok=oq_hNGW3"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/3mayaanglou.jpg?itok=oq_hNGW3" width="480" height="268" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p> </p> <p>From our content partner <a href="http://newamericamedia.org/2014/05/maya-marquez-mandela-the-disease-of-fakebook.php">New America Media</a>:</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Commentary</strong></p> <p> </p> <p>I have never read a book by Maya Angelou.</p> <p> </p> <p>However I must confess when Maya Angelou died I immediately felt I needed to Google “inspirational quotes Maya Angelou.” I knew my social media timeline would be flooded with them and I didn't want to be caught empty-handed with my cultural pants down as it were. How could I post a picture of my dinner in Kolkata on Facebook while the world was RIPing Angelou? What would they think of me?</p> <p>                </p> <p>For the record the Google search yielded 513,000 results in 0.27 seconds. That's a lot of Maya Angelou to choose from even for the most Angelou-ignorant.</p> <p> </p> <p>Once when a legend died, the problem was what to say if you hated him. But to have an opinion, good or bad, about a legendary literary figure you had to read her. Now for instant and innocuous insight you can just Google her. Once you faked sorrow. Now you fake familiarity.</p> <p> </p> <p>Of course a few of us forget to do even that and trip in our haste to be the early mourner at this virtual wake. A good friend confessed she routinely confused Maya Angelou with Toni Morrison. Even worse others on Twitter thanked Angelou for refusing to sit in the back of the bus so people could be free today. I am not sure if Rosa Parks would have been shocked or amused.</p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p>But most of us do our due diligence - at least one Google search. My social media feed is flooded with Angelou quotes. I have no idea how many of my friends have actually read Angelou. Or like her. Or for how many of them an Angelou quote is just a social media must-have fashion statement. In the virtual world it's almost impossible to tell the real from the pretender. When Gabriel Garcia Marquez died last month, it was much the same. Everyone wanted a piece of the Nobel prize winner to claim as their own.</p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/1google.jpg" style="height:351px; width:625px" /></p> <p> </p> <p>This is part of what The New York Times calls “faking cultural literacy”. “Data has become our currency,” writes Karl Taro Greenfield. “What matters to us, awash in petabytes of data, is not necessarily having actually consumed this content firsthand but simply knowing that it exists - and having a position on it, being able to engage in the chatter about it. We come perilously close to performing a pastiche of knowledgability that is really a new model of know-nothingness.”</p> <p> </p> <p>It's not unique to our age. But it's never been such a pandemic. And that's largely because it's never been easier to fake it. At one time it might have been embarrassing but unavoidable if we had to admit we had not read anything by an Angelou or a Garcia Marquez. We could try and save face by talking about a film based on their work if we happened to make that connection. But there was no easy way to pretend. But now that “pastiche of knowledgability” is so temptingly close at hand, we can search it on our phone and be instantly able to nod our head and add our two bits to the conversation. Of course those are the only two bits we know. And we didn't know them two minutes ago. But they will suffice for the brief period we need to stay culturally afloat as the Angelou wave washes over our social media timelines.</p> <p> </p> <p>It's in fact almost a waste of time to actually read Maya Angelou since most of us will only need her for that one status update.</p> <p> </p> <p>But oh, the pressure to make that status update count. It has to be the most profound. The most poignant. The most throat-catching one. And it certainly has to be a rare gem, the one that will demonstrate to our friends and followers that our knowledge of Maya Angelou is not just Wikificial. A little knowledge is no longer a dangerous thing. It is a good thing. An essential thing.</p> <p> </p> <p><br /> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/1marquez.jpg" style="height:349px; width:625px" /></p> <p> </p> <p>The barrage of information that assaults us from all sides has exponentially increased this pressure to always seem on top of it. As a journalist you don't want to be caught in an editorial meeting clueless about the story everyone else is discussing knowledgably. So you nod along as you desperately and covertly search on your annoyingly slow PDA. When a legendary figure dies, everyone has to have their Nelson Mandela tribute handy whether or not anyone has asked them for it.</p> <p> </p> <p>But Mandela, at least was a political figure. His life was writ large before us. We did not have to read books about him to be impressed and moved by him. Cultural figures however require a level of homework that no one needs to do anymore. I don't know how many of us had actually read Chinua Achebe but we all RIPed him with enormous feeling when he died as if in our own worlds things had just fallen apart as well.</p> <p> </p> <p>It's the relentless performance anxiety of being on social media that forces us to have an opinion on everything important.</p> <p> </p> <p>Except of course the more we do it, the more we are trapped in some hologram version of ourselves. Each bit of cultural literacy we fake gets added to the make-believe intellectual gravitas of our persona. And it makes confessing ignorance the next time around that much more difficult. He who mourned Achebe cannot be clueless about Angelou.</p> <p> </p> <p>And so we tweet on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into our dissimulation.</p> <p> </p> <p>As Angelou said... Actually I don't know what she said. I'd have to Google that first.</p> <p> </p> <p><em>A version of this story appeared on Firstpost.com.</em>             </p> <p> </p> <p>From our content partner <a href="http://newamericamedia.org/2014/05/maya-marquez-mandela-the-disease-of-fakebook.php">New America Media</a></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/celebrity-deaths" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">celebrity deaths</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/nelson-mandela" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nelson Mandela</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/gabriel-garcia-marquez" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Gabriel Garcia Marquez</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/maya-angelou" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">maya angelou</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/death" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">death</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/facebook" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Facebook</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/google" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Google</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/status-update" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">status update</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Sandip Roy</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-photographer field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Photographer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Wikipedia Commons; Google Images</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Mon, 02 Jun 2014 14:26:31 +0000 tara 4777 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/4028-celebrity-deaths-age-google-and-facebook#comments Creating Digital Identities: Recording Our Lives (and Others’) Online https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/1527-creating-digital-identities-recording-our-lives-and-others-online <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/news-features" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">News &amp; Features</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Wed, 09/05/2012 - 16:31</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/mediumCyberspace.jpg?itok=bQp33LQC"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/mediumCyberspace.jpg?itok=bQp33LQC" width="480" height="268" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>  </p> <p> From <a href="http://newamericamedia.org/2012/09/tweeting-and-living-in-a-world-of-mirrors.php">New America Media</a>:</p> <p>  </p> <p> A tragic and disturbing story from last week involved tweeting. A young woman who was being stalked <a href="http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/crime/hanna-truelove-16-found-dead-after-tweeting-about-stalker">tweeted</a> her impending doom a few days before her murder. "So scared right now," and "I got me an uglyass stalker" were some of her tweets. Then, closer to her death, she tweeted, "This can't be happening..." In essence, she was broadcasting events leading to her demise.</p> <p>  </p> <p> In the same week, a teenager in a suburb of Baltimore posted murder-suicide references on <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-08-28/baltimore-high-school-shooting/57375446/1">Facebook</a> before taking a shotgun to school and wounding one of his classmates on the first day of class.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Going back a month or so, there was another horrific story about a teenager who lost an arm to an alligator in Florida while swimming with his friends. He heroically fought the reptile and managed to get away, minus one limb. But the story didn’t seem fully realized without involving social media, and apparently the victim felt the same. According to <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/US/florida-teen-loses-arm-alligator-smiles-jokes-pain/story?id=16747543#.UEev7LJlT45">ABC News</a>, before going into surgery to close up his wound, he asked his friend "to snap a photo of him in the trauma unit and post it on Facebook."</p> <p>  </p> <p> The examples, of course, are endless. Yet they all seem to suggest that man's 21st century response to dramatic events is not necessarily just to simply interact with it, but to also record it. If communication technology was created to enhance our daily lives, something has dramatically shifted along the way: More and more, we are altering our behaviors in service of the digital world.</p> <p>  </p> <p> So many of us now have been raised on video games, cell phones and iPods. We’ve spent a large bulk of our lives in chat rooms, on Skype and posting videos to YouTube, to the extent that we’ve become news reporters and newsmakers, without even making much of an effort. We announce our actions and, in some cases, our impending demise online without giving it much thought. We have been so conditioned to invest our emotional life in the virtual space that it has become second nature. What’s more, many of us have learned to split our attention, with one eye on the electronic mirror and the other on reality.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Indeed, more and more, we are beginning to believe that we do not fully exist without some sort of electronic imprint in the virtual world, a digital projection of ourselves, a validation of our existence.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>Pipiatum ergo sum? I tweet, therefore I am? </strong></p> <p>  </p> <p> Wafaa Bilal, a photography professor at NYU, a couple years ago went a step further and implanted a camera in the back of his head as part of an art project. The camera broadcast a live stream of images to a museum in Qatar. On his skull, the real and the digital converge, and the real is photographed for the benefit of the digital.</p> <p>  </p> <p> The trend is "self-tracking," according to the <em><a href="http://www.economist.com/node/17388382">Economist</a></em>, and a market for these devices is rapidly emerging. There are wireless devices that can track people's physical activities, while other devices can take measurements of brainwave activity at night, to chart users sleep patterns online.</p> <p>  </p> <p> "People around the world are now learning how to leverage the incredible power inherent in the URL to create what is essentially a parallel universe of digital identities," noted Robert Young, an Internet entrepreneur. But in this new industry, he observed, "the raw materials for the 'products' are the people... the key is to look at self-expression and social networks as a new medium and to view the audience itself as a new generation of 'cultural products.'”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Perhaps it's too early to tell the long-term effects of an oversaturated information age on human evolution. But according to the <em>New York Times</em>, "Scientists say the constant use of computers and cellular telephones is causing a significant, evolutionary shift in our brain's wiring."</p> <p>  </p> <p> But one of the most troubling consequences of devoting so much attention to the virtual world is the death of empathy. Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford, told the <em>New York Times</em> that empathy is essential to the human condition. However, given the virtualization of the real world, and tendency for many to multitask, "we are at an inflection point," he said. "A significant fraction of people's experiences are now fragmented."</p> <p>  </p> <p> Which may very well explain a story that involves professor Bill Nye, popularly known as "the Science Guy" on TV a couple years ago. He collapsed on stage out of exhaustion as he prepared to give a lecture. But instead of rushing to the stage to help him, the LA Times and other media reported, many students in the audience took out their cell phones, snapped photos, texted and tweeted the event.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Or consider this now famous story involving YouTube. On March 30, 2008, a group of teenagers in Florida lured one of their own peers to one of the girl's homes and videotaped her beating. With one girl behind the camera to record the episode, and two boys guarding the door, the rest mercilessly beat the young woman into a concussion. It was for a dual purpose: to "punish" the victim for allegedly "trash talking" about them on MySpace, and to post the footage on YouTube. The most telling line during the beating, however, was when the young woman behind the camera yelled out: "There's only 17 seconds left. Make it good."</p> <p>  </p> <p> Seventeen seconds left, that is, in a 10-minute slot - the maximum time one can post a video segment on YouTube. The time frame and the incident prompted a journalist to quip, "Well, Warhol was only off by five minutes."</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>10 Minutes of Fame</strong></p> <p>  </p> <p> What makes that incident unusual is not the violent act itself - girl fights have been well reported, after all - but that the girls' actions were dictated not by a pure act of revenge but by a kind of exhibitionism rarely seen before. Stranger still is that, increasingly, the electronic world dictates exactly how an action should be carried out. The collective beating of the young woman, for instance, was directed to intensify as the video neared its 10 minute mark. (Did their beating lose steam, one wonders, when the camera stopped rolling?)</p> <p>  </p> <p> This modern mindset has given psychologists and anthropologists enough material to study what they call the "disinhibitive effect" on the Internet. Road Rage is quickly giving way to Net Wrath. Like actors who are trained to lose their reservations on stage, many now take daring risks for the virtual world - nevermind that they might have repercussions in the real one. They show it all, or do something enormously bizarre or violent, to garner lots of hits, lots of eyeballs.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Andy Warhol may have been off by five minutes, but he was otherwise frighteningly prophetic. A future in which everyone can be famous for about 10 minutes has indeed arrived. We have all become actors, filmmakers and reporters. We begin to believe that we are not fully ourselves, that we are not viable in the new system, unless we make some sort of electronic imprint, some sort of projection of ourselves, in the virtual world. Diaries, once locked away and hidden, have now gone electronic in the form of blogs and vlogs. The real event to some may no longer be as important as its virtual image, which can be relived online.</p> <p>  </p> <p> No one doubts that communication technology has enhanced humankind in marvelous ways. But it comes with a price. Mary Shelley's <em>Frankenstein</em>; or, <em>The Modern Prometheus</em> was a seminal work and a warning that the discovery of electricity could create a monster at the cusp of the industrial revolution, and that punishments awaited those who dared steal powers from the Gods. The Wachowski brothers' extraordinary movie <em>The Matrix</em>, made at the end of the 20th century, in which humans are enslaved and permanently trapped in a simulated reality, was in a way the same warning. Man in the 21st century has transcended geographical and even biological constraints, and found the power to translate himself in various media across the globe. But as a result he is seriously fragmented.</p> <p>  </p> <p> The hero in this new myth necessarily needs to become a prophet. For his is the arduous task of reintegrating the various fragments of the self, hearing the symphony in the cacophony, seeing the human in the digital -- or else, man will suffer being trapped forever, in the halls of mirrors.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>Author Bio: </strong></p> <p> <em>Andrew Lam is an editor at New America Media and the author of</em> East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres <em>and </em>Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora. <em>His book of short stories</em>, "Birds of Paradise Lost," <em>will be published next year. </em></p> <p>  </p> <p> <a href="http://newamericamedia.org/2012/09/tweeting-and-living-in-a-world-of-mirrors.php">New America Media</a></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/cyberspace" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">cyberspace</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/internet" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">internet</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/web" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">web</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/recording-lives-online" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">recording lives online</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/twitter" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Twitter</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/facebook" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Facebook</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/tweeting" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">tweeting</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/status-update" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">status update</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/new-york-times" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">New York Times</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/economist" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">economist</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Andrew Lam</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-photographer field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Photographer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">New America Media</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Wed, 05 Sep 2012 20:31:18 +0000 tara 1506 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/1527-creating-digital-identities-recording-our-lives-and-others-online#comments