Happy Friday everyone,

Hope you're looking forward to a Fem Fri filled with interesting thinking about the internet, and the often-weird culture that the internet creates!

Jenny Odell is a heroic chronicler of Weird Internet Stuff, please enjoy (perhaps in your lunch break) this long investigation of… I don't really know how to describe this. Fraudulent(ish) Amazon store fronts, a fraudulent (or at least under investigation) university, and real life locations which, if not fraudulent, are so incredibly odd that I feel a bit uncomfortable just reading about them:

“Do you want to check out those books?” the guy asked. No, I said. I wanted to buy them. “Oh!” he said, and then laughed to himself. “That’s right … we’re not a library.”

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/27/style/what-is-inside-this-internet-rabbit-hole.html

Hey and WERE YOU AWARE that Jenny Odell is writing a book based on her talk/article How to Do Nothing? I eagerly await it.

Next up we have our first historical analogue, in a highly enjoyable article about selfies in the Paris Review. If you're a bit wary of clicking on this one, don't be, it's light on the "selfies are bad and you should not do them" message that you have read before and are probably a bit zzzed with by now. Instead you get a great woman from history, Mary Morris Knowles, and what her work and self expression might mean for the work and self expression of women in general:

She’s smiling, her eyes are bright and calm. She has a charisma that so often resists artistic capture […] This is a woman who understood the power of her work and the radical nature of depicting herself doing it. The confidence in her gaze weaves its own kind of spell, creating a sense of the artist regarding herself as she actively constructs her self-image. Enmeshed in that self-image, central to it, is the work. The work of the piece and the work within the piece are indistinguishable.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/11/27/toward-a-more-radical-selfie/

Finally, in another historical analogue, we have Sei Shonagon, author of one of the classics of Heian Japanese literature which is also full of analogues in the modern world. The most obvious comparison is Tumblr, but I have another social network in mind when I read her. I am not going to say that Sei Shonagon invented humblebragging, exactly, but humblebragging certainly found an early perfected form in The Pillow Book:

Often though she dispenses with all pretences at humility! At least 80% of her stories end with a statement that boils down to "and I was very pleased with myself, and so was everyone else". I personally am not at all above concluding anecdotes with the phrase "and then I felt very pleased with myself", and it's good to read a book by a woman who is so clearly not even trying to perform low self esteem. Sei is always prepared say, "I did this thing, and it was good, and I'm happy about that", which is a refreshing message:

The impression Sei gives is of a woman absolutely satisfied, with herself, and with her world — which, it never occurs to her to doubt, is the whole world.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/08/18/national/history/heian-literature-fair-love-no-war/

Stay bright, calm and pleased with yourselves, all,

Alex.