The New York Times’ Jenna Wortham, in an interview by Om Malik:

I don’t buy that the internet has made us more narcissistic. It comes back to the division between how we present ourselves online and what we’re doing offline. I know I’m in a minority, and I probably will get laughed at for saying these things, but I see selfies as a version of how you present yourself online. It’s become the norm for better or for worse. And it’s easy to look at it in aggregate and think, “Uh, everyone who’s doing this is obsessed with themselves” rather than thinking about it in terms of something like an emoji, which is just a thing you use to express yourself and how you’re presenting yourself online. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing

“When You Can’t Be the Person The Internet Wants You to Be,” Felicia Sullivan in her Love.Life.Eat blog (2/19/16):

Online, you can’t be a trainwreck but you can’t project perfection either — lest you be deemed inauthentic, a “fake”. You can’t be too sad or too happy. You can reveal a little about your personal life but not too much, and know that people like the comeback story rather than watching you wade helplessly through the dark. They want your dark in past tense because no one wants to deal with your present or future tense sadness. They want that storyline to be played out behind the scenes, but they’ll stick around for the post-mortem. Over the past few months, a few friends have reached out to me privately to acknowledge that their sadness has also been shamed into silence — that the Internet doesn’t have the patience for unhappiness.

Humans do the darndest things. From “Robots deliver fun with hotel room service orders, and they don’t expect a tip,” by Hugo Martin (Los Angeles Times, 2/7/16):

Although the robot’s factory name is Relay, each hotel has given its machine a unique moniker. At the Residence Inn, they call it Wally. Other hotels have dubbed it Dash and Botlr.

The robot, shaped like a giant flower vase, contains an enclosed compartment where hotel staff can put drinks, snacks or other items that guests order from the front desk. Toothpaste makes the trip most often.

There are drawbacks to a delivery robot. After Wally brought fresh towels to a room a few weeks ago, the guest dumped his used, wet towels into the robot’s compartment. Wally promptly short-circuited.

“That was a sad day,” Beedon said. “It was like having an injured employee.”

After the robot was repaired, the general manager made a suggestion to [the manufacturer] Savioke: “They have to find a way to make that thing waterproof.”

Savioke is working on a fix, Lau said.

“The idea that someone would put wet towels in it never crossed our minds,” she said.

A decade ago, when the Huffington Post began its rise to success and search-engine-optimization nirvana — and before it built its own newsroom, preferring to rely on the contributions of a cadre of volunteer bloggers — it was frequently the target of journalistic ire. “Arianna is building her business on the backs of unpaid writers,” went the wail. Others pointed out: Um, if people want to write for free, and other people want to read what they write, what are you going to do?

But who knew that one day the editor of a British edition of the now Verizon-owned Huffington Post would make this argument (as captured by the New Statesman’s “Media Mole” columnist):

“I love this question,” said Stephen Hull, the editor-in-chief of Huffington Post UK, when Steve Hewlett asked him on Radio 4’s Media Show yesterday why he doesn’t pay his writers.

And this is the answer Hull apparently loves to give:

“If I was paying someone to write something because I want it to get advertising, that’s not a real authentic way of presenting copy. When somebody writes something for us, we know it’s real, we know they want to write it. It’s not been forced or paid for. I think that’s something to be proud of.”

Cue the Johnsonian chorus of “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

“Beastie Boys and Girls: The New Anthropomorphism,” By Robin Wright (The New Yorker, Feb. 10 2016):

In “Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide,” the Oxford don Charles Foster records his attempts to live as animals do — specifically, as a badger, an otter, a fox, a red deer, and a swift. The book, published in Britain last week, has caught on. The Financial Times calls it both “brilliant” and “bonkers” — “a strange kind of masterpiece: the song of a satyr, perhaps, or nature writing as extreme sport.” To be a badger, Foster took along his eight-year-old son, Tom, to better duplicate the creatures’ highly social lifestyle. The pair slept in a dirt hole and crawled on the forest floor and ate raw earthworms….

In “Being a Beast,” Foster, after recounting his badger experiment with his son, ultimately acknowledges that they failed to cross over to the world of the creatures. “No matter how much we convinced ourselves that we were part of their world, we remained as far away as ever,” he writes. ”I did not feel the ‘otherness,’ that sense of leaving human experience behind to which I aspired.” In the end, he had to concede his own nature as a human: “I preferred my ideas of badgers and the wild to real badgers and real wilderness.”