There is much about the shared terrain of being a black person in the United States that is not seen on small or silver screens or in museums or best-selling books, and much of what gets ignored in the mainstream thrives, and is celebrated, on Twitter.

Jenna Wortham

Categorized in : Small Person Black Silver

We live in a time of astounding technological advancements. There are deep-sea drones and live-streaming virtual reality.

Jenna Wortham

live virtual-reality time reality

Getting a tattoo is arguably one of the most insane decisions a sensible human can make.

Jenna Wortham

decisions make human tattoo

The web's earliest architects and pioneers fought for their vision of freedom on the Internet at a time when it was still small forums for conversation and text-based gaming. They thought the web could be adequately governed by its users without their needing to empower anyone to police it.

Jenna Wortham

vision police freedom time

Wellness, I came to realize, will not happen by accident. It must be a daily practice, especially for those of us who are more susceptible to the oppressiveness of the world.

Jenna Wortham

realize daily practice world

Learning to live with not meeting other people's expectations has been extremely freeing and is the only gift I wish to pass on to any future offspring.

Jenna Wortham

gift future learning people

There is no picturesque version of what self-care looks like; it's different for every person who wants to practice it.

Jenna Wortham

person like practice looks

The ancients often believed a celestial event like an eclipse to be a bad omen, that the sun or the moon vanishing from the sky was a harbinger of disaster, a sign of devastation or destruction to come.

Jenna Wortham

bad moon sun sky

Matching tattoos don't ensure the longevity of a friendship, any more than any other mutual hardship.

Jenna Wortham

tattoos more matching friendship

We are being conditioned, as a population, to never wait, to never delay our gratification, to accept thoughtless, constant consumption as the new norm. But how we think about consumption and willpower carry enormous implications for the environment and the culture of society as a whole.

Jenna Wortham

wait think society culture

Social media is my portal into the rest of the world - my periscope into the communities next to my community, into how the rest of the world thinks and feels.

Jenna Wortham

rest social-media community world

When I visited my family in Virginia, I tracked down my seventh-grade best friend and sat in TGI Fridays near a mall for hours, laughing while her daughter took insane-looking selfies on my phone.

Jenna Wortham

best family daughter best-friend

Familiarize yourself with the resources at hand to combat online bullying, and report offenders as often as you need to. Don't hesitate to report and block.

Jenna Wortham

need yourself you bullying

The Internet is especially adept at compressing humanity and making it easy to forget there are people behind tweets, posts, and memes.

Jenna Wortham

internet humanity forget people

Artists have long urged cultural introspection by creating work that forces awareness of our current political and economic landscape.

Jenna Wortham

landscape political work long

People in tech love to see their work as embodying the 'hacker ethos': a desire to break systems down in order to change them. But this pride can often be conveyed rather clumsily.

Jenna Wortham

change work love people

Ultimately, what the tech industry really cares about is ushering in the future, but it conflates technological progress with societal progress.

Jenna Wortham

about future progress industry

Perhaps all of us have come to rely too deeply on machinery and software to be our allies without wondering about the cost: the way technology doesn't fix problems without creating new ones.

Jenna Wortham

problems new technology way

Most efforts to approximate normal human behavior in software tend to be creepy or annoying.

Jenna Wortham

human human-behavior normal behavior

For many years, taking care of myself consisted of showering and showing up to work on time. Sleeping and eating were inconveniences at best.

Jenna Wortham

best myself work time

Twitter, it can be said, completely changed the way activism is done, who can participate, and even how we define it.

Jenna Wortham

how done said way