Nora Holzinger

Manufacturing consent through social media  There’s a kind of content online that I find really alarming.  It’s compilation videos of police body cam footage. It’s not content I would ever willingly watch, but I see other content creators referencing it as their “comfort content”, it plays on the TVs above the treadmills in my gym, and it’s content I’ve seen people in the wild watching on their devices. It’s becoming really popular. While this content is not new - the show COPS was at one time the longest running show on FOX News - it has now proliferated across the internet in a new form - this time from the cameras strapped to the officers’ bodies that are intended for use in investigations of police misconduct. Immediately leading up to the start of the Black Lives Matter movement, bystanders' video footage of  violent police encounters were central to finally getting the white majority to care about the unnecessary, extreme violence police commit against Black and Bro...

I peer at my too-bright phone screen, knowing I should be asleep – depression insomnia at an all-time high.  A young woman with perfect glowing skin in a perfectly manicured modern living room tells me that I just need to change my “self-concept” to achieve my goals and become “the woman of my dreams”.  If I just change my identity to “a person who eats healthy”, I will have no problem turning down the office breakroom doughnut or the ultra-processed food-filled girl’s night. I’m just not the kind of person who eats that stuff.  “Your mentality creates your reality.”  Well I guess my mentality created a reality where my job is a dead end, my skin is a mess, the earth is rapidly heating, I’ll never get out from under my student loans, and I’ll never lose the last ten pounds I gained after moving in with my partner.  I close the app and roll over. The next day, sitting in meditation a realization floated across the open sky of my mind.  What she was explainin...

 For the people who aren’t living the life they dreamed. Courtesy of The Sunday Times Hannah Neelman, the pretty face of the Ballerina Farm social media accounts is a Julliard-trained ballerina and Mormon who married into the JetBlue dynasty and now lives on a farm in Utah with her eight children.  Lately, her videos have made their way through the YouTube algorithm to my feed, and they are a vision. She kneads sourdough on an antique butcher-block countertop, out the window are rolling green hills, the warm yellow sunlight lancing artfully through the window glass. All her cooking utensils are antique replicas made of metal, ceramic, and glass – a far cry from the plastic filled drawers of my own kitchen.  The next scene, a perfectly arranged plate of lemons nestled against three perfectly burnt pillar candles and an enamel colander filled with berries. Sometimes she’s not speaking at all and there’s inoffensive mid-century swing music playing over the video. Sometimes s...

It’s clear to me that the US government has been studying anti-vaccination, and not just for public health reasons. Last month, Reuters reported that during the COVID-19 pandemic, from 2020 to 2021, the US military used fake anti-vaccination Twitter/X profiles to discourage COVID-19 vaccine uptake in developing nations, including the Philippines.  The Pentagon employed the most classic anti-vaccination talking points that I also found in my anthropological work among anti-vaxx and vaccine refusing parents in rural Arkansas right before the COVID-19 pandemic.  In the summer of 2019 (halcyon pre-pandemic times!), I spent about ten weeks living in a small rural community in the Arkansas Ozarks, conducting interview and visiting homes and community gathering places, in order to learn more about the manifestation of anti-vaccination in a rural setting. As a former unvaccinated child myself, I was curious about how rural vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccination differed from the more...

 Halfway through an epidemiology conference session, the last of the day and an hour before dinner, something a presenter said jolted me out of my hungry stupor:  “A lot of AI innovation is going to come out of the Global South.” I had only half paid attention to this woman’s presentation on software that uses artificial intelligence (AI) via cell phone camera to scan and digitize handwriting from paper health forms in Malawi, when I was suddenly transported back to an undergraduate anthropology class and a book titled Theory from the South (2012).  This book, written by anthropologists Jean and (now-disgraced) John Comaroff, in part posits that the Global North (Europe and America) is actually evolving to be more like the Global South (Latin America, Africa, parts of Asia). The authors go on to argue that the Global South has been treated like a “laboratory” of capitalism – where new configurations of industry, labor, and regulatory environments are tested and honed be...