Internet — Culture & Technology

Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media

Habit produces freedom for thought beyond immediacy—how much time would I waste, in my daily life, if I had to think about every breath I took?—but habit can force us down paths that are no longer beneficial. Once habits become unmoored from the goals they supported, their vestigial remains can haunt us, warp the way we approach the world:

Although goals can be satisfied in various ways, there is only one way to satisfy a habit: by repeating it exactly.

After a generation of watching images on a screen and being told over and over, “This isn’t real, this is just entertainment,” the habit of dismissing the flickering shadows projected into our lives has become our reality. We don’t believe what we see, nor do we even believe what we say—the always-on nature of the network means your “brand” can never waver: always be riffing; I’m just kidding. Unless…; say whatever gets the most likes. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to retweet it, does it make an impact?

David DinaburgJanuary 18, 2023Non-Fiction, Internet, media, habits

Everything I Need I Get from You

“The experience of bodily joy is an invitation to reconsider the conditions that hold you away from it most of the time.” As far back as college, I was teased for saying about a scene from a movie or a line from a book, “[blank] was so good, it made the whole experience worthwhile.” I am my own cliché, but here it is. “The experience of bodily joy is an invitation to reconsider the conditions that hold you away from it most of the time.” Excerpted, this line does work. It crashes hard into the mind, and it sits there. In the context, it is heartbreaking. Imagine hundreds of thousand of people—perhaps mostly women—enjoying themselves fully in front of One Direction or Bruce Springsteen or ICP or whatever they like. And then the screaming stops, and they are subsumed by the role of mom, wife, daughter, lady, girl, woman.

David DinaburgSeptember 12, 2022Internet, Feminism, Tumblr, One Direction

Lurking: How a Person Became a User

What a heavy curtain that single year was: the Sophomores, Juniors, and Seniors above we millennial Freshman lived lives so untethered from the great pulsating mass of technological connection as to be a fundamentally different experience. Did they go home the summer of 2000 and sweat with anxiety because they were no longer connected to the wider world? That feeling of loneliness—not being surrounded by peers physically, and not even being surrounded by their digital ghosts—was heartbreaking to me, a feeling I can still remember more than twenty years later. Was that the first itch of internet addiction?

David DinaburgSeptember 2, 2022Internet, Tech, 1990s, 2000s

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is

I want to continue to go hard at this book as a sort of personal catharsis. I will rein it in, though, because there is a lot of value in the text outside of being the subject of an AVGN reaction video. I like the general concept of the book a lot. It’s sort of like a smarmy version of Jenny Odell’s How to do Nothing, though its tone is so…abrasive…that picking at the text is like scratching an itch—I know it actually makes things worse, but it just feels so good in the moment. The first chapter and intro are, as I’ve said, preachy and out of touch. I’ve rarely had a text that is so basic in its thesis—that of the general zeitgeist of the internet in the last decade is “dumpster fire”—talk down to me so viciously.

David DinaburgAugust 2, 2022Internet, History, Storytelling

The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business

If you want technology to be the driving force emancipating the downtrodden and shattering the shackles of ignorance, it merits explanation why the onus is on the end user to start out as a sophisticated consumer on par with a multinational conglomerate. But we never get any more discussion about how to square the idea that technology can free the teeming masses from their ignorance but only after the “I accept” button has been clicked. It smacks vaguely of colonial imperialism or noblesse oblige; a Digital Man’s Burden. A digression—what fascinating data-scraping algorithms might distinguish between the EULA-proof proto-technological naïf and the tech-savvy wunderkind—never materializes. Or even recognition that to begin distinguishing between the layman and the laity, data-scraping would have to pick apart personal information. No machine solutions can “assist” without first accessing information; so how then, can machine solutions be the answer to how and what information to share?

David DinaburgDecember 23, 2020Tech, Internet, Computers

This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture

This is Why didn’t teach me about trolling as an act unto itself. It gave me a reason to think about trolling as a reactive impulse to a society that sells its own cruelty back to itself. That’s a real cognitive framework to make trolling comprehensible as a part of culture, rather than as the aberration that people pretend it to be.

David DinaburgMay 11, 2020Non-Fiction, Internet, Trolling, Tech, Computers