Babbling Corpse by Grafton Tanner

“In this oversaturated culture, we feed on media to a point beyond fullness, and that can open up within the most avid media junkie an ‘abyss,’ as Reynolds calls it, ‘the dimensions of which are in proportion to the emptiness of your life.’ Perhaps we can think of it as digital melancholia, the feeling of never being full, of never encountering an end to the information stream, of never actually catching up with all that culture we feel we must keep up with in the first place. It is a lonely, exhausting burden unique to our moment in history. After all, you are still alone in your room even after checking Facebook, downloading a trove of music, and watching pornography. This bitter loneliness, one that gives the illusion of socializing on these social-media platforms, is a facet of this digital melancholia: we surf the web alone and binge on media alone.”

-Grafton Tanner, 2016