Reading · Alive in Social Media

This page did not load. You can still read it on the original site — the toolbar below keeps your place in the directory.

Using a Kodak Charmera and writing on paper again is not another form of snobbery, but proof of a need to reprogram our attention. The Japanese concepts of 'Tatemae' and 'Honne' can help.

Tuesday evening on Earth. It’s sunny in Paris. Share this letter if you like it!

I recently bought a Kodak Charmera, a digital camera that doubles as a keychain. An object weighing 30 grams of electronics, shooting at 1.6 megapixels. Objectively terrible quality by the standards of the latest smartphones. And yet, the Charmera captures the spirit of the times and a deep desire: to accept imperfection in order to add our own intimate texture to our digital content. It is perhaps a way of fighting social media fatigue: documenting everything, again, because digital perfection has ended up erasing memory in favor of performance. Where the iPhone smooths reality to make it acceptable to the algorithm, the Charmera textures it to make it ours.

Social media empties reality of its substance

Since the rise of selfie mode, we have grown accustomed to taking shot after shot to get “the right one.” Google and Apple now automatically group these dozens of photos to suggest the best…

Texturing the Digital World to Feel Our Own Truth

Comments