Online, there is an irresistible social currency to being a user who has thousands of followers, who starts memes, who comes up with an idea that is turned into a movie. But I wonder how comfortable we should be with this arrangement. Jenna Wortham Read Quote
The web’s earliest architects and pioneers fought for their vision of freedom on the Internet at a time when it was still small forums for conversation and text-based gaming. They thought the web could be adequately governed by its users without their needing to empower anyone to police it. Jenna Wortham Read Quote
As a lonely teenager growing up in Virginia, I fed off any pop culture that could show me different ways of being from what I saw on ‘The Cosby Show’ reruns or read about in an Ann M. Martin book. Jenna Wortham Read Quote
Producing zines can offer an unexpected respite from the scrutiny on the Internet, which can be as oppressive as it is liberating. Jenna Wortham Read Quote
Social media seemed to promise a way to better connect with people; instead, it seems to have made it easier to tune out the people we don’t agree with. Jenna Wortham Read Quote
Social media is my portal into the rest of the world – my periscope into the communities next to my community, into how the rest of the world thinks and feels. Jenna Wortham Read Quote
Artists’ obsessions with technology are not new, but in the late aughts, the work tended to focus on the possibility of the medium, treating technology like a new tool rather than a sociopolitical framework. Jenna Wortham Read Quote
Thinking about Amazon’s restraints – the company has never tried to introduce a social network or an email service, for example – you can understand something about the future Amazon seems to envision: A time when no screen is needed at all, just your voice. Jenna Wortham Read Quote
We are being conditioned, as a population, to never wait, to never delay our gratification, to accept thoughtless, constant consumption as the new norm. But how we think about consumption and willpower carry enormous implications for the environment and the culture of society as a whole. Jenna Wortham Read Quote
The fact that I live in New York, a city that thrives on accessibility, might explain why I was slow to grasp the appeal of Alexa. Here we have bodegas on every corner, most open 24 hours, in case you need to pick up a roll of toilet paper or a bottle of hot sauce in the middle of the night. Jenna Wortham Read Quote
