However crude, social media today allows us to cut and paste our world into a space (mostly) under our control.
Whether we’re posting on Pinterest (an action likened to tearing pages out of a magazine to share with friends), retweeting news updates, or liking songs on Facebook, the internet serves as a new scrapbook of sorts.
In his NYR Blog essay conversation with Ellen Gruber Garvey’s Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance, Christopher Benfey explores the transition from consumer to producer through intentional posting.
Scrapbook-style writers included range from Walt Whitman to abolitionists, Emily Dickinson to modern NYT columnist Joe Nocera — all of whom are trying to bring order to the torrent of information overwhelming readers.
