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Blogs depicting illness at its most life-threatening gain traction. We click on the extreme, to flirt with death and abject horror through an electronic medium.
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The internet is forever trying to make itself physically tangible, encompassing everything from the fitness instructor who assures you they feel the pain too, to the hospital selfie, to Arduino sex toys and teledildonics. In the same way that a makeup blogger on YouTube swatches products on their wrist to make them somehow more “real,” physical suffering must be written on the flesh. YouTube memes like the cinnamon challenge and the NekNomination are compelling for very real possibility that they might (and do) go horribly wrong. Bodies built by the internet, like the Human Barbie or steroid abuse victim Zyzz, are walking memes too extreme to survive in real life, forever on the verge of collapse as though sustained only by retweets.Suffering makes the denizens of the internet more real, more human. Members of health forums include their diagnosis and dosage in their signatures: illness becomes a personal hashtag. Given the cost of healthcare in America, and the stigma which can accompany diagnosis, it’s little wonder that illness functions as a new kind of social tribalism. Post-illness narratives like The Big C, The Fault in Our Stars or even Breaking Bad link disease inextricably to heroism.Our fascination with pain and suffering make them natural clickbait, a new kind of online “wound culture."
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