You will laugh. You will cry. You will read. A screenshots of despair slideshow assembled for PrtScrn: The Lazy Art of Screenshot and Networkcultures.org.

1. Before I started the screenshots of despair blog,
I spent a lot of time just wandering around my
digital existence.

2. It was easy to feel disconnected, even when other
people were around.

3. I saw weird things.

4. Often, the online world feels like a hostile place.

5. People are constantly trying to coax you into
doing things.

6. The pressures of putting on a digital persona are often
overwhelming.

7. And it’s easy to get confused about who you
really are.

8. All too often, I felt like I was shouting into a void.

9. But then something occurred to me:

10. The digital world need not only be ephemera.

11. With a more nuanced reading, maybe one could extract some
humanity from the digital moments we were experiencing.

12. By capturing a screenshot, maybe we could remove
text from its context in order to see it anew.

13. Once I started posting images within the frame of a tumblr blog,
the idea of reading the screenshots in a different way made sense
to other people, as well.

14. But one must ask: Do these screenshots help us understand
the world any better?

15. Can any intellectual, societal or spiritual meaning be read into the
decontextualized words taken from constantly changing screens?

16. Just because something sticks around, does that imbue
it with meaning?

17. It’s hard to say.

18. Maybe beyond our simply experiencing this often-bizarre digital
existence…

19. …what’s important is that we see it collectively.