Featured in
- Published 20250506
- ISBN: 978-1-923213-07-4
- Extent: 196 pp
- Paperback, ebook, PDF

Already a subscriber? Sign in here
If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au
Share article
More from author
In the fullness of time
Non-fictionOur devices and data are more than extensions of our physical bodies. The so-called ‘human-centric’ approach to designing wearable and carriable devices means that they disrupt traditional divisions between work and leisure, production and consumption. It’s difficult not to feel the incursion of work-logics into leisure times and spaces as normal. Stretched for time, couples, families and friendship groups are starting to organise themselves using tools like Slack, Jira, Trello and Asana – that is, in the same way as workplaces.
More from this edition
When the ships become water nymphs
Poetry Swans that are almost swans, sharp-tongued fruits, mocking sheep farmers whose faces grow woollen, dancers at the bush-doof manic to their portable generators – changes come swift...
Björk in concert
FictionThe wind feels strange on his face. He hasn’t stepped outside in too long. He hesitates in the doorway. He really doesn’t have time for this. He needs to write that last chapter. He needs to finish what he has promised. What separates humans from everything else is our urge to create. He turns back towards his computer but then he is outside and locking the door and it feels like he has no agency over this. His body wants to go for a walk and so he must walk. He catches a glimpse of something bright poking up through the mulch at the base of a tree. A mushroom. Then suddenly they all come into focus. Mushrooms everywhere. Mushrooms on tree trunks like little shelves for fairy books, mushrooms in the mud and mushrooms in among the grass. There are even little net-like things around red stalks. Weird Cronenberg mushrooms, half fungus, half machine.
Very online feelings
Non-fictionIn 2013, the Oxford English Dictionary declared ‘selfie’ its word of the year, and Twitter later declared 2014 ‘the year of the selfie’ after the term was mentioned more than ninety-two million times on the platform – a twelve-fold increase from the previous year. It was in this context that influencer selfies provided templates and scripts to spur more consumption and more desire, taking commodification of the body and the self to the next level. For instance, influencers popularised a whole ‘science’ around how to craft the most desirable faces through cosmetics and surgery, how to perform authenticity through ‘casual selfies’ that felt extra sincere but that also required extra behind-the-scenes effort, and how to assuage tensions arising from accusations of excessive plastic surgery and ‘fakery’. Selfies were reclaimed, transformed by their creators from expressions of mere vanity to useful tools of subversive frivolity. Influencer couples also sold us benchmarks of romantic perfection through carefully orchestrated couple photographs, love declarations on social media and ‘rules’ about how to be the perfect partner.