A generationIn October 2016, American digital artist Jenny Odell led the participants of the San Francisco lecture series on a virtual tour of a long past era: the mid-1990s-a period when people are still confused about the Internet. No one knows how to understand the Internet, so you watch VHS tapes and TV shows, where friendly men in shirts ironing compare it to a highway system, while some children in the background are balancing on office chairs and doing surfing .If you decide not to just look at the new world, but to integrate yourself into it, you will discuss science fiction and paleontology on non-commercial platforms such as Usenet, and build bulky platforms Geocities-websiteShow their pets and build a shining temple for the actors of “X-Files”.
Users with the purest hearts call themselves “netizens”, a derivative of “citizen”, that is, residents of a specific area with rights and obligations. More skeptical people have reason to believe that the Internet will make what you do easier—read newspapers, save address books, communicate with colleagues, and eat sandwiches at home—but it won’t create a whole new reality, because Our curiosity and social skills are increasingly being abused to increase the financial and political power of large technology companies.
This speech was called “how to surf the Internet” by Odell. It initially ended with an anecdote about riding a train, during which she had a nervous conversation with a veteran who she suspected like Trump and his grandson. Rich dialogue, she is already sitting in the dining car at their dining table. She advocates “more dining trucks on the Internet”, more coincidences, and more spontaneous communication with strangers, just like before.
Divide time into hours that can be monetized
But when she began to write a speech two months later, the results of the presidential election have made this belief seem as naive as the old highway analogy: if the Internet is still a highway, then she now writes, “Based on previous behavior (And purchase history), people are forced to go back to the same place over and over again. In fact, the highway itself always seems to return to their own neighborhoods, while others have their own routes and have nothing in common with themselves Place.”
At about the same time, Odell began to visit the 90-year-old Morcolm Amphitheater in the Rose Garden near Auckland almost every day. There were birds all around, and her goal was to gradually learn from David Sibley’s birdwatching bible, and she just sat there for a few hours. In the morning, she wandered in front of the kitchen window, watching a crow and its cub bravely jump from the phone line across the street to the peanuts she threw on the balcony, and were watched by them again.The evening after get off work-Odell teaches at the Art Academy Stanford -She found herself taking a detour from the bus stop, passing by a pair of night herons, their laser red eyes and white belly reminded her in a strange and comforting way of ghosts, ghosts from the past of a former civilization in Auckland as a swampy area .
