Hannah Daly

In a media and cultural environment fueled by the one-off, the hashmark functions as a kind of communal claim to public space. We are already constantly presenting ourselves to the world around us: we are beings of the brand, the public profile, the brief bio and a network of intertwining links.

Like the meat product from which it gets the name, spam is a special sort of deception. The promise sounds great: it’s easy, it knows us inside and out, all we could ever possibly desire is right there within the particulars of its offer. Spam knows how complicated my life is most of the time and has made it simple for me.

Looking at pictures of people, you start to notice things that get lost in the quickly changing landscape of everyday life. A still image provides the time and space for a kind of attention that draws out minute subtleties of gesture, expression, texture. The magical quality of certain visual details climbs out of a good picture, and into you.

We were talking about relationships in my living room, over Aperol drinks with ice cubes and cigarettes off the fire escape. The ethereal echo of something lo-fi and chillwave set the mood. The heat lifted its oppressive finger, ever so slightly, in the early evening glow.

It is hard to connect, even though we are hyper-connected, through wires and across clouds. It is hard to see, even though everything is crystal clear HD or coming right at us 3D. It is hard to feel and think, even though information and commentary comes at us at hyper-speed, updated every ten seconds…

But there it is again, creeping up within myself, and certainly embedded within the snobby eye rolling of some circles, many of them I frequent: how can we like the stuff of straight-off-the-shore juiceheads, most often heard spilling from Hummer sound systems of stunna-shaded, French Connection-clad drivers?

An email pops into my inbox. A stale alert informs me a particularly active friend has, yet again, posted to a group we both belong to. I quickly jump windows on the screen, sighing and eye rolling, to perform the ritualistic set of clicks simply to get that annoying little blue-boxed 1 to go away from the left column of my Facebook homepage.