Sarah Kareem

In our emojified world, it’s more obvious than ever that reading is a kind of seeing, an activity in which we respond as much to visual cues as to linguistic meaning. For example, recently I’ve thought about the fact that I tend to favor Facebook’s “love” emoji over the other newly available reaction icons and also over the old “like” button. My hunch is that I reflexively click on the heart less because the emotion it’s supposed to represent corresponds with how I really feel (i.e. that I feel especially ardent towards people’s posts) and more because the heart emoji appeals to me in a way that isn’t reducible to its semantic content. The Facebook heart emoji, after all, isn’t just a shorthand for “love”; it’s also a visual composition, more pleasingly abstract than the other reaction icons, the white heart against the red circular background evoking a paper cutout, or an ace of hearts with its color fields reversed. Unlike Facebook’s other reaction emojis, the heart’s shape stands...

How would the history of computer-generated entertainment look different if we located its forerunners not in earlier art or media forms such as the novel or cinema but in more perduring skeptical modes of perception in which we interact with the real world as if it were imaginary?1 In the eighteenth century, David Hume and Joseph Addison characterized philosophical skepticism as a mode of occupying two worlds simultaneously— the world of perceptions and the world of objects—that may be activated anytime and anywhere. I will argue that this skeptical orientation, which Hume designates “feigning a double existence,”2 is an early example of

How would the history of computer-generated virtual worlds look different if we located their forerunners not in the realistic fictional worlds of earlier art or media forms such as the novel or cinema, but in skeptical modes of perception in which we interact with the real world as if it were imaginary? In the eighteenth century, David Hume and Joseph Addison characterize philosophical skepticism as a mode of occupying two worlds simultaneously that could be activated anytime and anywhere. Central to the experience of this early example of an “alternate reality” game, which Hume designates “feigning a double existence,” is that the mind shifts between seeing through and looking at the objects before it. These shifts yield a perception of these objects as “flimsy,” that is, alternately transparent and opaque. This very quality, I argue, constitutes a defining feature of the modern conception of second-order worlds. Examining Hume and Addison’s accounts recasts the broader history of fictionality as one of everyday experience as well as specific genres and media and suggests the long history of modes of perception frequently assumed to be unique to the digital age.