Author Archives: croutonjohnson

I’m tired of this As I was preparing to write this blog, I read this excerpt from the book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age By Sherry Turkle. As I was reading it, I got defensive, and then I got frustrated, and then I wanted to throw my laptop on theContinue reading “An Open Letter to Sherry Turkle”

Social media resembles reality, but not quite. It’s not a street corner where you can say whatever you want without consequence, but it is close. It is not a debate with someone over a kitchen table, but it’s close. Thanks to the development of social media, the world is greatly changed, but hauntingly the same.Continue reading “Social Media is Greek to Me: How public forums exist online”

A couple years ago I went on a few dates with a guy that made VR films. I sat in his dining room and he put the headset on me, and was suddenly in a new reality. I was with him, but I wasn’t. A few months later, he moved across the country and IContinue reading “The Body Electric: Intimacy in our Virtual World”

welcome 2 the dennydome I remember seeing Denny’s tweets back in 2014. They made me feel something. Was it camaraderie? Relief? Mutual trust? It was unusual for a brand to say something so stupid, and I loved it. Are We Postmodernism Yet? Before we dive into the world of Brand Twitter, Lets talk about something.Continue reading “The Postmodern World That is Brand Twitter and What it Means for The Rest of Us”

Friendships happen in unlikely places. For a good part of my life, I had friends that lived in this little talking device I carried around. It wasn’t much but they made me laugh and cry and told me things I didn’t know. I found that when I was loneliest, I could feel less alone. LonelyContinue reading “Humanity and Podcasting: the Real Treasure was the Friends we made Along the Way”

In freshman year of college I found a little diamond-in-the-rough podcast called Why Oh Why, hosted by Andrea Silenzi. It was a podcast about dating, in particular: online dating. I didn’t know why the podcast resonated with me until now. The Game I had just broken up with my high school boyfriend. I was wayward,Continue reading “Tinder advice from an Economist and the Cure for Disillusionment in Love”

a small town facebook group, with a lot to say In 2015, my mom bit the bullet. As a longer time adversary of Facebook any everything it stood for, my 60 year old mother was finally asking me to make her an account so she could keep up with her book group. I obliged andContinue reading “OK Boomer, Let’s Settle This in the Comments”

“Should a happiness machine be something you can carry in your pocket or should it be something that carries you in its pocket? One thing I absolutely know,” he said aloud. ‘It should be bright!’” Ray Bradbury’s short story, The Happiness Machine, published in 1957 predicted the modern day relationship between man and machine. TheContinue reading “Are we living in Ray Bradbury’s Happiness Machine?”

What am I to you? What do I look like? What do I sound like?  These questions are, clearly, not unique to the environment of social media. They apply to the corporeal, all the way back to the early 1600s and the life of English philosopher, John Locke. Locke explores questions of perception, reality, andContinue reading “Plastic, Perils, Perception”