"I’m now in a long-distance relationship. Part of our thing is to trade photos we take. They silently arrive, pulled from our pockets when we feel the vibration. I got one the other day from Oakland. It showed two goats, one a tiny baby, standing on a set of stairs next to some bright white birds. An urban farm. Perhaps I should have been thinking about all the technology that went into sending me that photo. The charged-couple device that could capture the light, the wireless networks, the way the device I was using was turning me into a bumbling idiot absorbed with the virtual instead of the REAL WORLD. But I didn’t. I thought about the hands that took the photo, fingers and the fingernails, then wrists and arms running up to shoulders and along the ridge there to the face hiding under a bonnet of curly locks. I saw her looking at farm animals and thinking of a home. That particular pile of bits wasn’t just a pile of bits. It was like bones, an intimation of a body and a place, a body in place. A story. Our messages carry with them the smudges and swipes, the tap-taptaps we use to make meanings. For transport, they are flattened and virtualized. Then it is up to us — as an act of imagination — to reinflate them. This relationship predates, well, everything."
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This rebuttal to the Zadie Smith Facebook piece makes some good points, but the more personal concluding paragraphs are my favorite part.
