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”.
Kinship of all Species 