Sometimes I envision my Twitter feed as rushing water: my presence is a dam, and each tweet is debris making its way downstream. It’s now a challenge to let information simply flow—to let tweets swim by without me seeing or interacting with them.
Author Archives: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
First Thoughts on Moving In (Or, How My Internet Shrunk)
But I no longer have to rely on looking outward, into a sea of pixels, to sustain this particular relationship in my life. It’s interesting to feel this layer of my Internet now inside my home, absorbing into me, into him, into us. Two planes initially distinct, merging over the course of a year-and-a-half, now intertwining.
Filed Away: On Pinterest and Dreams
Sure, I was collecting things in an online space. But it still felt like clutter, fit for shoe boxes under my bed. And with Pinterest, my aspirations no longer floated in my head. They were right there: discoverable, pinnable, and recyclable by others. Aren’t my dreams supposed to be elusive? Unable to be bookmarked?
On Favorited Tweets and My Internet Limbo
But on Twitter, it’s different: favoriting is less about someone else and more about me. The process is about plucking the juicy bits from others’ minds and imaginations and tossing them into a cauldron—a volatile place that mirrors my headspace at any given moment.
A Q&A with Karl the Fog: San Francisco’s Elusive Landmark
I was delighted when our very own fog, @KarlTheFog, was recently listed among TIME magazine’s 140 best Twitter feeds of 2012. I decided it was time to reach out and befriend this unique being, a muse of sorts, that makes San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area what it is.
Online Mourning and the Unexpected Refuge of Facebook
Alone, I sobbed. Yet I sobbed with Facebook open—his life revealed and exposed in bits on my screen, his friends spilling tears on his profile. I sobbed at home, by myself, but also with everyone else.
Notes on Home, Life, and Love
In between these meetings, we’ve created a space for us, just us, online: a portal through which that flow sustains. A borderless space that transcends geography, that exists somewhere only we can access.
It’s All About Simplicity: A Few Things I’ve Learned About Instagram
I love experimenting with filters on static and solitary objects, clean symmetrical or diagonal lines, uncluttered compositions, and off-center focal points (especially with the tilt shift effect). Simply put, the app magnifies the gorgeousness of simplicity.
Set Words Free: On E-Books, Jonathan Franzen, and the Book Itself
Parks says the literary experience is “pure mental material, as close as one can get to thought itself.” The e-book, then, pushes us even closer to the text; it creates an even purer experience, stripping words from the tangible.
That Thing I Wrote That Wasn’t True: On Facts, Memoir & John D’Agata
But something happens as time passes—as I drift further from a memory, as a fact is dislodged from the place it had once made sense. I begin to play with a fact: I pluck it out, examine it, and let it stand on its own. It is vulnerable: the context that hugged it is stripped away.