Jenna Wortham Quotes
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The ancients often believed a celestial event like an eclipse to be a bad omen, that the sun or the moon vanishing from the sky was a harbinger of disaster, a sign of devastation or destruction to come.
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People in tech love to see their work as embodying the 'hacker ethos': a desire to break systems down in order to change them. But this pride can often be conveyed rather clumsily.
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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.
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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.
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It's becoming much more common to see yoga studios offer classes aimed exclusively at people of color who are searching for ways to cope with racism and fears around police brutality.
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In many ways, Obama is America's first truly digital president. His 2008 campaign relied heavily on social media to lift him out of obscurity.
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When I visited my family in Virginia, I tracked down my seventh-grade best friend and sat in TGI Fridays near a mall for hours, laughing while her daughter took insane-looking selfies on my phone.
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The future will bring new possibilities and ideas - and new terms for them.
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In America, mixed-race identity tends to invite both curiosity and suspicion, largely because few have found a way to interrogate it without centering whiteness as the scale by which to evaluate blackness.
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Producing zines can offer an unexpected respite from the scrutiny on the Internet, which can be as oppressive as it is liberating.
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Falling head over heels in love with women was a habit I thought I'd thoroughly grown out of in middle school, when a group of about five girls and I color-coordinated our outfits and spent weekends and even some weeknights sprawled out in each others bedrooms.
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Most efforts to approximate normal human behavior in software tend to be creepy or annoying.
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It wasn't always easy - getting dumped by my female friends for their newfound boyfriends, husbands, girlfriends stung; I felt like a jilted lover, heartbroken and wondering what I'd done wrong. But it was also easier to forgive them, to accept what time and energy they were willing to offer, even if it was less than what I wanted.
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Twitter, it can be said, completely changed the way activism is done, who can participate, and even how we define it.
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Perhaps all of us have come to rely too deeply on machinery and software to be our allies without wondering about the cost: the way technology doesn't fix problems without creating new ones.
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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.
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There's a lot of paranormal activity in my family. Whether it is more than most other families is hard to say, but we seem to have more than most.
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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.
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Obama routinely pushed policy that pleased the tech-savvy, including his successful effort to keep broadband suppliers from giving preferential treatment to bigger web companies over individuals.
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Spotify, Tidal, and even YouTube, to a degree, are vast and rich troves of music, but they primarily function as search engines organized by algorithms. You typically have to know what you're looking for in order to find it.
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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.
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The argument has been made that smart women on screen are already enough of a minority to make up for the lack of women of color. Nope. Not good enough.
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The celebrated film critic Pauline Kael once wrote that movies function as escape pods, portals to parallel universes that can be radically different from emotional norms and societal conditioning of our own. What she meant was they parceled out freedom, allowing viewers to lose their selves in an effort to find greater connection to the self.
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The types of ideas protected by intellectual-property law typically don't include a clever catchphrase on a Vine or a film idea in a tweet.