Celebrating Bin Laden’s Death and the Return of the Knowable World

Was May 1, 2011 about good versus evil?

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Nathan Jurgenson contends in his article, Celebrating Bin Laden's Death and the Return of the Knowable World, that on the evening of May 1, 2011 Americans breathed a sigh of relief knowing that "the bad guy" was dead. We could momentarily cheer for the home team because we scored in a truly tangible way. But will this sense of celebration last? Who will replace bin Laden as "the new symbol to ground our naive presumption that the world. . . is simple and knowable?"

Nathan Jurgenson is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Maryland working on a dissertation about self-documentation on social media.