Episode 38: Texture

The Ridiculous Hour · Feb 1, 2023 · 17m

In 1964 a father penned a bedtime story for his sons called Flat Stanley. In it, Stanley is flattened by a falling bulletin board which makes it possible for him to be sent through the postal service in an envelope to a friend in another state. He returns in a fresh new envelope full of stories about his time with friends. Strangely, this seems like such an apt description of what we've become socially. We flatten our voices into text messages, our movements into reels, our physical presence into sharable images and we send them to our "friends." We stopped calling this "connection" long ago…