Jessica Johnson

The story To Be Black at Stuyvesant High from the NYTimes this week did not sit well with me. This story focuses on the sad reality of some specific individuals, which is interesting and important in its own way, but it means the story doesn’t get at the root of what’s actually happening here. Black students aren’t set up succeed for these kinds of merit tests. Their elementary schools and middle schools don’t have the same resources to prepare students for these tests. But this fact is painted over by the general belief in the American Dream– that everyone can succeed if they just work hard.

One commenter says: “Racism does not hold back blacks in general. It is their lack of success that does. One should not necessarily hold back the other. Keep focusing on education, and you will eventually succeed and overcome all doubts. This much is clear from the lessons we’ve learned from other minorities who have risen the ladder of economic success in America.” This is not an uncommon belief. This is disturbing. Has our country really already forgotten that we institutionally identified black men and women as NOT people, as partial people, and finally as separate-but-equal people?

Perhaps you know the feeling: so many thoughts, so many half-baked phrases, not quite sure how to put it all on paper, mind going crazy with hyper-links to all the other still-doughy ideas of the last forever.  Perhaps you also know this ending: no writing accomplished, many pages surfed, beers ingested, feeling of failure.

A good friend once told me how to deal with this problem. “Just get over it and write, already.”  My counterargument didn’t hold much water, either.  “Who cares if you can’t finish?  I get distracted all the time by other ideas.  I always see ways of making this exact point better.  Just don’t finish it.”

Just don’t finish it.  Holy.

Yes, it makes perfect sense.  What is ever finished on the web?  Isn’t that what makes the internet seem so human?  It’s always in a state of revision, of continual growth.  Today, this technoethicist finally embraces her medium and gives into the hyperlinks (mental and digital) and vows to give up on completion.  Fellow members of the ADD generation, who needs to finish when you can—

It has been a long while since I’ve published. In the spring, I went through what many of my new friends also experienced: PhD rejections… from everywhere. It was a hard couple of months of reevaluating self “truths.” I decided to continue to pursue my passions in a slightly different (and slightly more expensive) way: at the University of Chicago’s MAPH program. It’s not math with a speech impediment… that’s Masters in Humanities. With a random P. P for “program” apparently.

I’ve been inspired to get back to writing by a few of my friends’ blogs that I hope you will check out. MAPHmaticallyYours explores the life of a MAPH student. I think it’s a great place to begin to think about the community that’s built online to supplement the one we live in offline. I say we here to mean specifically “we the MAPHers” but also “we as humans.”

Bill Hutchison’s The Philosophical Animal a different breed: in his own words, it’s “a blog dedicated to considering animals in practice, theory, and at the intersection of the two.” He’s similarly sharing his work (both personal and MAPHtastic), but where MAPHmaticallyYours explores a human community, Bill’s exploring our human-animal relationships.

I hope to get back to my work here and complete this community trifecta (speaking of horse races… (weren’t we speaking of horse races?)) by continuing to consider virtual communities and human-tech relationships.

Coming back to writing after being away is like wrestling through death and the afterlife all at once. These words that were once me are now not, and yet I can begin anew with new ideas, new life. A new tide. And with that, goodnight. You’ll hear from me again soon. (really).

“Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me”

I appreciate when my sister stands up for me when men tell me in some form that I’m too fat to love. “What an asshole!” she says. “He doesn’t deserve you! You’re beautiful!” I know she means it, and I know she wants me to agree.

But she simply cannot understand. Every time I hear the words–and there seems to be an infinite number of ways to say “you’re too fat”–I am not insulted or angry. The reality is much worse. I feel immediately reduced to my body. To a material object. Reduced to a physicality on which I don’t even get to inscribe meaning. I feel powerless. I feel trapped. Like everything I am–my personality, my hopes, my history–is overwritten by one externally decided truth: you are fat. fat is bad. My subject position is ripped from me; I don’t have a space to speak from. I am not a speaking subject. I am just fat.

Fat girl syndrome gets worse from there. I turn this external hatred in on myself. As I’m left feeling completely exposed and objectified, I fight back against what’s reduced me to this state. My sister can easily blame the man who “just prefers skinny girls.” But I’m an object now. I can’t speak out against him any easier than a dining room table could. But I can reject the flesh that traps me, silent as antique furniture. And I do.

I hate my own body. I hate my body in the same moment that he reduces me to it. I hate my body, and my body is all I am.

Maybe this is what lead me to my love for the internet in the first place: a chance to exist outside of my body heavy with pounds and heavy with meaning. Yet here we are in the “internet era,” and here I sit hating my flesh. The internet won’t allow us to live outside of materiality. My one shred of hope is that the internet can provide a medium for expression even in those moments when fat girl syndrome takes over and I feel like I’m nothing but an (unlovable) body.

There is hope in a –virtually– immaterial subject position. Even for fat girls.

When I made this website, I was still living in New York, and I was still living in a state of mind that I can’t access now any more easily than I can access the Brooklyn Bridge. Technology was my life. I checked Twitter every 15 minutes from anywhere I was via iPhone. A day never went by that I didn’t spend a significant amount of time on Facebook. I actually read every article on Mashable, somehow, even while working. I managed to blog, browse recent social media studies, chat with friends, keep up with Twitter trending topics, Facebook friends with new babies, and, you know, work a full time job. I would say I thought nothing of it, except I did think something: that I couldn’t live without it—that I (along with my peers) had progressed to a stage in development where we would simply always be online, always connected.

I left full-time, full-on New York life for idyllic Vermont with no cell reception. I went on a rapid detox from tech, and I didn’t like it. But by the time I got to Hong Kong, I noticed something happening: I wasn’t craving social media like I thought I would. I suppose this truth is apparent in the time between this post and the last. This empty blog shouldn’t be interpreted as a lack of writing, however. I’ve filled notebooks, napkins, post-its, and any paper I could find with my thoughts.

Paper. And ink. So material, so present, so… antiquated. In my first pen-and-paper reflection, I realized a major hurdle of ballpoint writing. There is no backspace! My thoughts, once given material form, were etched into my journal. Even crossing them out wouldn’t erase their existence, only modify it. Erasing pencil marks still left traces behind, carved into the bleached paper. These remnants have to be a defining characteristic of materiality… material things are unbackspaceable.

It’s not a far stretch to consider the the human body in the same way. I think of the Showtime series, Dexter (I’m completely addicted): people are killed, bodies erased, but there’s always a trace left. Dexter often refers to these traces as “ghosts,” which is probably a concept that warrants its own post. The relevant point here: physical, material, bodily identity cannot be obliterated.

On the other hand, online identity was once completely backspaceable. One could create a personality and delete it again in the same evening. I say online identity was once erasable because it really isn’t anymore. It’s become common sense that anything said online can come back to haunt you (ghosts?). For sure, better internet indexing systems have helped to preserve crossed out virtual iterations. But what strikes me as more important is the role of social networks in sustaining online identity. I may try to delete my Facebook account (though, to be honest, I’ve never even been tempted), but posts I contributed to friends, photos I shared, mutual friends, those pieces would persist.

Online, our permanance, our unbackspaceable-ness, is linked to our virtual communities. Recognition by other Facebook friends in my virtual community make me a real member of that group. I’m not suggesting that online persistence is the same as physical remnants. But I think back to my life in New York. I believed that online existence was the way of the future (and maybe even of the present), and I was not alone in that thinking. We will continue to live as bodies in a material world, but increasingly, we will be living online. Virtual living will necessarily be different, but it will not be unrecognizable.

As humans and technology become more codependent, social networks grow in importance and prevalence. We’re drawn to that which makes us unbackspaceable, that which allows for a sort of virtual materiality. What does our desire for a kind of virtual “realness” say about our offline relationship with the material, with our bodies? What does the fact that community establishes virtual materiality say about our offline materiality and the connection to others?

Questions to ponder, possibly with a pen.