"In five minutes, the app had sandblasted my cognitive matter with twenty TikToks that had the legibility and logic of a narcoleptic dream."
— Tolentino, Jia (b. 1988)
Author
Work Title
Date
September 30, 2019
Metaphor
"In five minutes, the app had sandblasted my cognitive matter with twenty TikToks that had the legibility and logic of a narcoleptic dream."
Metaphor in Context
I opened the app, and saw a three-foot-tall woman making her microwave door squeak to the melody of "Yeah!," by Usher, and then a dental hygienist and her patient dancing to "Baby Shark." A teen-age girl blew up a bunch of balloons that spelled "pussy" to the tune of a jazz song from the beloved soundtrack of the anime series "Cowboy Bebop." Young white people lip-synched to audio of nonwhite people in ways that ranged from innocently racist to overtly racist. A kid sprayed shaving cream into a Croc and stepped into it so that shaving cream squirted out of the holes in the Croc. In five minutes, the app had sandblasted my cognitive matter with twenty TikToks that had the legibility and logic of a narcoleptic dream.
(p. 35)
(p. 35)
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Jia Tolentino, "How TikTok Holds Our Attention," The New Yorker (September 30, 2019). <Link to www.newyorker.com>
Date of Entry
10/02/2019
