The Internet Archives - Public Seminar

The Internet

Showering for Salvation

The viral, hours-long “everything shower” promises women purity

March 23, 2026 • by Drew Vogelsang

The influencer Vanessa Faga has amassed 1.6 million followers on TikTok, posting a new self-care routine video each day. Her content ranges from a “productive Monday morning” to a “winter self-care night,” to promote a new set of wellness products. She presents a life of curated optimization, where every moment ...

Art & Design

Joanna Walsh’s E-Elegy

Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters offers a remembrance of posts past

December 10, 2025 • by Eva Szilardi-Tierney

Here’s a theory: The posts, tags, and profiles that constitute the internet are all works of art, produced by amateur artists. Whether or not these amateurs recognize their work’s “artiness” is irrelevant; participation on the internet requires acts of intentional creation and studied self-representation, with the express purpose of display, ...

Democracy

Is Social Media Destroying Democracy—Or Giving It to Us Good and Hard?

It’s easier to blame the algorithm than the bewildered herd

October 28, 2025 • by Dan Williams

One of our era’s most influential narratives is that social media is destroying democracy and perhaps civilization itself. For the liberal establishment, this story helps to explain the surging success of right-wing populism, as well as collapsing institutional trust, growing polarization, and an apparent explosion of misinformation and deranged conspiracy ...

Is Social Media Destroying Democracy—Or Giving It to Us Good and Hard?

Interviews

The Powerful Convergence of Past, Present, and Future in Catherine Texier’s Latest Novel

An interview about After David

January 23, 2025 • by Hannah McIntyre and Catherine Texier

An older woman and a younger man—a trope that operates on elements of fantasy and plays with conventional expectations. The dynamic between an older woman and a younger man is complex; it's looked down upon, and it never gets tiresome. In After David (ITNA Press, 2024), Catherine Texier explores these themes ...

The Powerful Convergence of Past, Present, and Future in Catherine Texier’s Latest Novel

Sex & Gender

After David

Why not get together for coffee?

January 23, 2025 • by Catherine Texier

Logging on the site is like stepping into a candy store. Or walking into a party and waiting for someone to talk to you, some swaggering dude with a joint in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. Except he is the only one you’re waiting for. All ...

Media

From the Sewer of the Internet, a Slang Surfaces

Why are my friends talking like incels?

October 7, 2024 • by Jake Neuffer

“Been gymmaxxing lately,” my friend quipped as he made a protein shake. “Proteinpilled too,” I said. My generation is speaking a new slang—new to us, anyway. Not quite ubiquitous, but familiar to that contingent of chronically online youth (and is that phrase not becoming a tautology?). These are phrases borrowed from incels, ...

From the Sewer of the Internet, a Slang Surfaces

History

Why the Study of History Belongs to the Public

How social media makes possible a more democratic republic of letters

January 17, 2024 • by Rose Botaish

For many museums and archives, social media has already become a space to share more widely images and information from their collections....

Why the Study of History Belongs to the Public

Sex & Gender

Walk Like a Loaded Man

An excerpt from The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men

June 5, 2023 • by Manuel Betancourt

Unlike the more straightforward concept of horniness (whose own mythic visual iconography is rife for analysis), thirst is more visceral, a physiological need....

The Internet

Why I Joined Twitter Blue

And why so many people are quietly doing it too

February 2, 2023 • by Claire Potter

Twitter Blue is essentially a different Twitter—and the other, nonsubscription one is not neglected or "broken"—it got broke....

The Internet

The Fall of Facebook

Plus the insurrection subcommittee prepares to confront Trump and the debt ceiling fight continues

October 5, 2021 • by Heather Cox Richardson

“hello literally everyone,” the official account of Twitter tweeted on Monday afternoon, after Facebook and its affiliated platforms Instagram and WhatsApp went dark at about 11:40 this morning. The Facebook outage lasted for more than six hours and appears to have been caused by an internal error. But the void ...

The Internet

Glenn Greenwald Punches Down

Worse, when he attacked an intern for USA Today, this established and wealthy journalist also threw the truth under the bus

April 1, 2021 • by Claire Potter

My disappointment with Glenn Greenwald, who I once admired for his work on the Snowden revelations, escalates. Watch as Greenwald, who has 1.6 million followers, deliberately exposes a recent college graduate, a woman, to a screaming mob of trolls on March 28, 2021: Screenshot via Glenn Greenwald's Twitter @ggreenwald. What a bully. More importantly, ...