The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (Nathan Jurgenson, 2019)

Nathan Jurgenson is a sociologist who made a name for himself as head writer on the site Cyborgology. He carved out a niche writing critically about technology while simultaneously embracing the always-online lifestyle. His angle is an insider view, and he goes full force characterizing the criticism of say, Sherry Turkle, as moralistic and complacent. To me, that seems wholly unhelpful. He also has a rather unusual idea of humans – as if the normal person is a Californian who checks Instagram every five minutes. These silicon valley rules only applies to a very limited set of people, but the sense one gets from these essays is that Jurgenson thinks these rules are human universals. This is really quite narrow-minded. 

He also tries to update to the digital era cultural theories of photography by the likes of Barthes and Sontag. Attempting to outline a framework where the social photography is a language of its own, he gets lost in his axe-grinding attitude to ”boomer” tech critics. His critical writing is even more compromised by the fact that shortly after the publication of this book he accepted a position at social app company Snapchat as an ”in-house media theorist”.

What Language Do I Dream In? (Elena Lappin, 2016)

A memoir that seems to revolve around reinvention through languages. Lappin has a somewhat unusual family history. Late in life, she received an anonymous phone call informing her that her father was not her biological father. The book sees her tackling this fact and tracks her new relationship with the previously unknown original father. It also traces the many movements of her family. They move from country to country, adopting a new language every couple of years, ending up with as she herself says ”five languages in search of an author”. These are (in order of appearance): Russian, Czech, German, English, French. She is also surrounded at various points in life by Armenian, Hebrew and Welsh. The title refers to a question this often leads to as she recounts all the languages the commands: what language does she dreams in? No language at all, is the disappointing response… with a reference to fellow polyglot auto-reinventor Vladimir Nabokov. She also manages to mention her stint as editor for the London-based magazine Jewish Quarterly and her ambulatory life married to a research linguist. She is very straight-forward in the telling of her story, with lots of run-of-the-mill detail, but it manages to engage throughout. Her parents died shortly after this book was published. I was drawn to Lappin’s book because of its purported focus on multilinguality and identity, because I am a polyglot myself. I soon found that the book was not really that much about languages at all, and I need to keep looking for a worthy example of the elusive ”language memoir” (some candidates: Eva Hoffman, Heinz Wissmann, Nathalie Sarraute). Lappin also writes a little about her younger brother, infamous German novelist Maxim Biller.

My language chain starts with Hungarian, Romanian, Hebrew, German (the languages spoken by my grandparents (my grandfather also learned Polish in the camps, but died before ever getting to use it)). My own linguistic journey is marked, just as for Lappin, by different periods living in different countries. Swedish, English, French. Norwegian. I studied Latin as well. Icelandic. Later I picked up German, some Spanish. I studied Russian, dabbled in Italian, Polish. Ah, so many languages, but the proficiency varies greatly.