{"id":2343,"date":"2022-12-14T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-12-14T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/websites.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/?p=2343"},"modified":"2022-12-11T20:43:22","modified_gmt":"2022-12-11T20:43:22","slug":"who-what-is-a-21st-century-monster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/2022\/12\/14\/who-what-is-a-21st-century-monster\/","title":{"rendered":"Who\/What is a 21st-Century Monster?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What is the difference between a friend and a follower? Both are interchangeable in conversations about social media and internet relationships, but is there a harm in this indistinguishability? <\/p>\n\n\n

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Kim Fu\u2019s \u201c#CLIMBINGNATION,\u201d in Lesser-Known Monsters of the 21<\/em>st<\/sup><\/em> Century<\/em> (2022) asks just this question, using the \u201crelationship\u201d between an Instagram influencer and his fan to reveal what digital intimacy really entails, and the potential dangers of mistaking a digital world for the real thing.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fu\u2019s short story follows April, a woman who arrives at a memorial service to pay her respects to Travis, a rock-climbing Instagram influencer who she claims to have been close with in college. By lying about their relationship, April quickly gains the trust and respect of Travis\u2019s inner circle, including his best friend Zach and older sister, Miki. As the night goes on, April learns more about Travis\u2019s personal relationships with Miki and Zach, and how the life he presented online might not have been as wonderful and exciting as it seemed. By the end of the story, April is forced to reckon with the boundaries of digital spaces with real-life consequences. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a review of Curtis Sittenfeld\u2019s \u201cThe Prairie Wife,\u201d author Ariel Katz reflects on the relationships between technology and people. She remembers something a teacher in one of her college writing workshops once told her, which is this idea that, \u201cthe inclusion of millennial technology\u2014social media, smart phones, apps, and the like\u2014as gimmicks [\u2026] could undermine a story\u2019s timelessness.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n

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However, I think the issue is less about the gimmicks of technology and more about what happens when they end, when the \u2018digital curtain\u2019 rises, and we are forced to acknowledge the role technology plays in forming our real-life relationships. Technology is a facilitator, not a determinate. In other words, technology is a means of building connections, but it is not an end all be all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We see the consequences of \u2018chronically digital\u2019 behavior in the character of April, who is less jarred by the separation between digital and physical reality and far more fascinated by the separation, as if the distance, the intangibility of the relationship makes it all the easier to fetishize. \u201cHe was less a person than a quilt of these beautifully colored squares. His view of the world from above, geographic and breathtaking, was so different from wherever she was: squatting over the toilet in her dark bathroom, lying in bed with a bag of unsalted tortilla chips balanced on her chest.\u201d (48)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is easy to sit in the space between worlds, between what is real and what is imagined to be, online. April stays here because it is comfortable: to see and follow other people\u2019s online activity but not participate yourself. This particularly voyeuristic interpretation of social media is not necessarily pessimistic, but cautious. After all, this is why social media can be so attractive: it offers a space where voyeurism can thrive as apolitical. It doesn\u2019t force people to interact with content. Instead, it is the user, or follower, who can decide which specific content they want to consume, whether that be food bloggers or style guides. Because the onus is on the user to make decisions in digital spaces, social media offers a space where nobody is obligated to anyone but themselves.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fu acknowledges this point, extending this idea further to ask what happens when someone forcibly makes themselves obligated to someone else, in the case of April acting like she is one of Travis\u2019s closest friends. Near the end of the story, April is forced to acknowledge how little she actually knows about Travis and his friends and family. \u201cAll of Travis\u2019s accounts had been deleted or changed to private, \u2026 As had Miki\u2019s. Without them, she couldn\u2019t think of a way to connect to Zach. \u2026 His last name, in articles, was uselessly common, and she couldn\u2019t remember his handles. \u2026 She imagined a skeptical officer \u2026 [m]iddle-aged but still getting the graveyard shift, \u2026 someone peripherally aware of Instagram and YouTube as something his children did. And who are you, he\u2019d ask. Who are you to them?\u201d (61)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question of \u201cWho are you to them?\u201d can then be shortened to \u201cWho are you?\u201d to reveal an even deeper meditation on identity in digital spaces. Fu\u2019s short story thus acts as a harbinger of what can happen when we acknowledge the limitations of technology as a means of understanding ourselves and others. After all, if you do it right, nobody will know if you stalk someone online. But if you bring that obsession to the real world, you can\u2019t just exit the app and go back to watching TV.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is the difference between a friend and a follower? Both are interchangeable in conversations about social media and internet relationships, but is there a harm in this indistinguishability?  Kim…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1818,"featured_media":2350,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-about-reading","category-about-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1818"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2343"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2351,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343\/revisions\/2351"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}