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The familiar loneliness of the Kinetoscope


One other way that the 2020s resemble the 1890s

When we think of media and technology in the 1890s, certain images come to mind: the yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst, muckrakers exposing runaway corporate power, the serialized novels of H.G. Gertrude Stein (who spent part of the 1890s studying with William James at Harvard) famously called the twentieth century “a time when everything cracks, where everything is destroyed, everything isolates itself.” In entertainment, as in dining, modernity has transformed a ritual of togetherness into an experience of homebound reclusion and even solitude.” From Derek Thompson’s excellent Atlantic article about loneliness in 2020s America.

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Photo of familiar loneliness

familiar loneliness

Photo of Kinetoscope

Kinetoscope