Word: self
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...doesn't know what it wants to be. This is an ideological, even ontological lassitude. The reason the postcommunist world is so unstable is not that Russia is on the verge of repatriating old turf. It's that Russia is navigating between two ideas of Russia: its former Soviet self and its current shadow of that former self - a cartoonish, hopelessly upside-down mythology versus a dispiriting reality. Russia will not transcend this dichotomy until it begins building a truly original future instead of trying to cobble together a distant past...
...Tough going, but it seems of interest that this inward turn proves so pervasive, even inevitable, in every form of online expression. If the furious e-mail is the product of being concealed from other tangible humans, being nevertheless laid bare to them may induce this pathological self-consciousness. Consider Internet journals, a total inversion the dynamic of the private diary. The same goes for (another contributor) YellowBanana’s penchant for sprinkling the novel’s text with the word ‘banana’ (either vandalizing or improving...
...never had to deal with spiteful “trolls,” the progeny of a device that allows the dispatch of hateful, threatening messages to others without any spoken or visual contact—risk-free. But they also lived in an age bereft of the neurotic self-awareness of our own; this is drawn into stark relief by “A Million Penguins.” It’s not long before things become hopelessly meta, as in George’s mid-narrative musing: to Jim’s question...
...This is the biggest obstacle to becoming a Harvard celebrity. I can take photos, send them to GossipGeek, maybe even make the front page. But this self-promotion will accomplish nothing unless people find me interesting. And with our skeptical attitude towards celebrities at large, Harvardians tend to look dubiously at anyone with aspirations to the status of “big man on campus.” Indeed, other than a few “actual” celebrities like Natalie Portman, the occasional figure skater, and the offspring of oil barons, Harvard celebrities are an eclectic lot, tangibly...
...have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority,” the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) wrote in their 1962 Port Huron Statement, expressing their optimism toward man’s potential to govern his own life and change his world in the face of racial discrimination and the existence of the Bomb. The students in SDS were confident that they could obliterate the loneliness, estrangement, and isolation...