Social media Archives - Public Seminar

Interviews

Ghosting: How Technology Is Changing Our Hope for Connection

A conversation with author Dominic Pettman on how the phenomenon of ghosting is experienced in the modern age

March 26, 2026 • by Mariana Giacobbe Goldberg and Dominic Pettman

Ghosting: when someone just stops replying to messages, stops returning calls, and for all intents and purposes vanishes without warning from your life. The term names the sudden ending of a relationship, through disappearance rather than a clear confrontation or closing act: It describes a mode of withdrawal by absence ...

Ghosting: How Technology Is Changing Our Hope for Connection

The Internet

Showering for Salvation

The viral, hours-long “everything shower” promises women purity

March 23, 2026 • by Drew Vogelsang

The influencer Vanessa Faga has amassed 1.6 million followers on TikTok, posting a new self-care routine video each day. Her content ranges from a “productive Monday morning” to a “winter self-care night,” to promote a new set of wellness products. She presents a life of curated optimization, where every moment ...

Literature

Against Storytelling

Stories are certainly utilized as a strategy to touch people’s hearts—but mostly when there is something to sell

December 9, 2025 • by Miriam Rasch

The glorification of storytelling to define who we are or save the planet induces aversion in some: Philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the obsession “story-selling.” Do digitally packaged stories restrict how we perceive our often rambling, fragmentary lives? Could alternatives be found in open, porous and incomplete narratives, even when confronting ...

Democracy

Is Social Media Destroying Democracy—Or Giving It to Us Good and Hard?

It’s easier to blame the algorithm than the bewildered herd

October 28, 2025 • by Dan Williams

One of our era’s most influential narratives is that social media is destroying democracy and perhaps civilization itself. For the liberal establishment, this story helps to explain the surging success of right-wing populism, as well as collapsing institutional trust, growing polarization, and an apparent explosion of misinformation and deranged conspiracy ...

Is Social Media Destroying Democracy—Or Giving It to Us Good and Hard?

Artificial Intelligence

Who Does My Algorithm Think I Am?

A portrait of the author according to her apps

March 11, 2025 • by Marisol Aveline Delarosa

My phone thinks I might have a dopamine addiction. While scrolling social media recently, I paused on a video advertisement depicting a woman scrolling on her phone, lounging on the couch, and slamming down her laptop in frustration. It may as well have been security footage from my own apartment, except ...

History

Why the Study of History Belongs to the Public

How social media makes possible a more democratic republic of letters

January 17, 2024 • by Rose Botaish

For many museums and archives, social media has already become a space to share more widely images and information from their collections....

Why the Study of History Belongs to the Public

Uncategorized

Paradoxes of Free Speech

How the amplification of limitless speech acts can silence others

February 21, 2023 • by Peter Nohrnberg

Our culture’s fetishizing of self-expression, apparently without any limits, is paradoxically undermining free speech....

Capitalism

The Rat Race of Prestige and Boredom

W. David Marx on how status affects human behavior

November 9, 2022 • by Alla Anatsko and W. David Marx

The whole idea of cultural capital is knowing what objects to buy, how to arrange them, how to behave—all of these things go together. Just because you can purchase an object does not mean you can get into the group....

Politics

Moonwalking in Brasilia

How Jair Bolsonaro creates the illusion of moving forward while sliding back

October 26, 2021 • by Felippe Ramos

In Brazil's ongoing experiment with a far-right populist President, there is a gap between Jair Bolsonaro's performance in face-to-face rallies and on social networks and his minimal accomplishments as a politician constrained by a complex constitutional network of institutions and norms. Bolsonaro’s oral and written communication is filled with the hallmarks ...

The Internet

Why We Should Ban Oppressive Speech Acts

The debate around deplatforming and “cancel culture” remains mired in a naive understanding of how language really works

February 24, 2021 • by Natasha Lennard

_____ When Twitter and Facebook shuttered the account of Donald Trump, along with thousands of others for allegedly spreading far right violence and conspiracy theories, many felt that it was long overdue. Antifascist organizers and writers, myself included, have for years argued against giving platforms to white supremacists, including powerful public ...