Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age

by Felicia Wu Song

Social media platforms also enhance our performances by supplying us with a pre-fab toolkit of bitmojis and emojis, online gestures, gifs, and photo filters. These all help us express ourselves in a social environment that is generally stripped of the complicated dance of verbal and nonverbal cues, and the subtle pitch and tone of someone’s voice. Manufactured expressions of exuberance or outrage increasingly become shortcuts for how we choose to interact with each other on social media as these tools ingeniously shave down the phenomenological experience of embodied or aural communication to a mere click of a button. We grow to rely on these shortcuts and often circumvent the training grounds of learning how to genuinely express these sentiments through our own voice, words, or embodied presence.