“How To Kill Digital Dualism Without Erasing Differences”:

“Well, at least for a methodological purpose, we may risk, in being so concentrated in demolishing digital dualism, overestimating just how enmeshed the digital and analogue are, assuming uncritically that this dichotomy is already over. But it’s not. There are still things which are only analogue – a flower, a death, a book, a night with a friend are analogue by themselves. And there are things which are only offline: a person who’s never entered the web, or a text that has never been transmitted by the internet.”

#socialmediatheories: Astute analysis of the varieties of social media experience.

“Everyone prefers to be the added not the adder on Facebook.

To follow and not be followed back on Twitter is a mild disappointment. To have your Facebook friendship denied is a disaster.”

“Hermann Hesse on What Trees Teach Us About Belonging and Life”:

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche.”

While we’re on trees, you might also want to check out Alan Jacobs ongoing side project: “Gospel of Trees.” And speaking of Jacobs, I’m quite pleased to report that he is blogging once again. The link to his new blog has replaced the link to his old blog among the Sites of Note listed to the right.

“The Tyranny of Algorithms”: Evengy Morozov reviews Christopher Steiner’s Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World.

“The real question isn’t whether to live with algorithms—the Sumerians got that much right—but how to live with them. As Vonnegut understood over a half-century ago, an uncritical embrace of automation, for all the efficiency that it offers, is just a prelude to dystopia.”

You can listen to Jerry Brito interviewing Steiner here.

Several years ago, I read Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated and I was impressed with his analysis of our hyper-mediated identities and their discontents. The style of the writing is breezy and, after a while, it begins to grate just a tad. But the core argument remains persuasive. It may profitably be read alongside of sociologist Peter Berger’s Heretical Imperative and The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (with Thomas Luckman). Of course, assuming you don’t have time to read Mediated, much less Berger’s books, here is a short clip of de Zengotita discussing the dilemma of authenticity:

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And finally, Bourdieu, food, chart: