Tag Archives: Social Media

Cancel Field Trips, Cancel Forest Rangers: The Every by Dave Eggers (2021)

By Sebastian Tants-Boestad

Dave Eggers’s best­selling tech dystopia, The Cir­cle (2013), has final­ly received a sequel. While The Cir­cle described the rise of a fic­ti­tious tech and social media com­pa­ny and its protagonist’s steady descent into the mael­strom of sur­veil­lance cul­ture, The Every now picks up a cou­ple of years lat­er, after the Cir­cle has acquired a big online retail­er “named after a South Amer­i­can jun­gle.” The result­ing mega cor­po­ra­tion, called the Every, is pret­ty much the monop­o­list in all things dig­i­tal tech – from apps to online shop­ping to cut­ting edge hard­ware. Of course, it’s every bit as scary and unlike­able as one would imag­ine it to be. 

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Meet Doug Emhoff – The First Second Gentleman

By Sabrina Völz

Usu­al­ly, the spous­es of vice pres­i­dents of the Unit­ed States don’t attract much pub­lic atten­tion. Many Amer­i­cans prob­a­bly can’t even name more than two or three sec­ond ladies, but that is just a guess. Yet Doug Emhoff is the hus­band of Kamala Har­ris, the first female African Amer­i­can, South Asian Amer­i­can Vice Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States. He’s becom­ing a house­hold name and break­ing down bar­ri­ers as America’s first Sec­ond Gen­tle­man as well as the first Jew­ish spouse of any vice pres­i­dent. Does that real­ly mat­ter, you might ask your­self? It shouldn’t, but it does. Let’s take a look at a clip from an inter­view tak­ing social media by storm that gives us insight into his popularity:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeF8_UcrDz0

So is he ‘just’ a father as well as a charm­ing and sup­port­ive hus­band of a ‘Pow­er­frau,’ as we would say in Ger­man? Or will he play a real role in Amer­i­can life and pol­i­tics? What can we expect of a man in the role of Sec­ond Gentleman?

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Can Artists Save Us?

By Jessica Müller

How much do celebri­ties, influ­encers, and social media actu­al­ly impact us? The way we con­sume media has changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly over the past decade, and while many of these changes come with a mul­ti­tude of new chal­lenges, social media has also enabled us to com­mu­ni­cate on a glob­al scale. Celebri­ties, influ­encers, artists and the work they pro­mote and pro­duce direct­ly and indi­rect­ly influ­ence our soci­ety and our behav­ior towards our planet.

A while back, rap­per Lil Dick­ey released a song in col­lab­o­ra­tion with thir­ty famous artists and celebri­ties in order to raise aware­ness for the issue of cli­mate change and the dam­ages it pro­duces. Lil Dickey’s song imme­di­ate­ly went viral, and mil­lions of peo­ple watched it. But what is this song actu­al­ly good for? Will it change any­thing at all?

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