Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

Well this was... a bemusing read.

It begins with the stated intent of engaging with, and critiquing, the internet as a vast, collaborative work of realist art – so far, so good. It sets off along that path with reasonable confidence, and some interesting things to say (including the main thesis, that “[The internet's] transformation of everyday life includes moments of magic and an inevitable experience of profound loss.”).

This is quite the undertaking, and careens all over the map: forums, Twitter, Instagram, the iPod, VR, email, analog telephones, transhumanism, missionaries, philosophical academia, and so on... eventually winding up in some kind of incomprehensible morass of spirituality/religion.

The overall structure, enigmatic to begin with, fell apart quickly, and I struggled to find connective tissue or a narrative between the sections. The entire work veered rapidly into a sort of memoir of the author's own relationship with technology, littered with winking allusions to (and occasionally scathing attacks on) philosophical schools, eminences and lines of inquiry for which I have no context whatsoever. The whole thing might make more sense to a classically-educated academic?

Her arguments have a great deal of poetry to them, but I was often left at a loss (hah!) for what exactly she was asserting, as she tended to gesture in the general direction of a thought without really completing it or telling me what she meant by it. Lots of extremely bad takes which lost me entirely, like – stating that it's likely user interfaces evolved from text to graphics because most programmers are/were dyslexic? That the move to the mobile and app-mediated web has “striking” parallels to “white flight” out of Detroit? That something deep in our biology lets us know that MP3-encoded music isn't “really” music, but is merely a representation of music? I mean.... what?

The last few chapters seemed to desperately want to say something about religion (or, as she would have it, theism) but again, her unwillingness to talk directly about her subject left me trying to piece together the puzzle of what she actually believes or even what she wants to express about those beliefs. Apparently she wrote a web article in which she declared herself a Creationist, but she meant it sort of ironically, and was shocked that she drew fire for it?

Everything in this book happens at two or three levels of remove, and I can't say I really relate to her rhapsodic nostalgia about certain cultural artifacts, nor to the way she seemed to consider being a technophile shameful (in college, she swore off computers, but then got a Compuserve email address, a fact which she kept hidden?). She takes this odd tone of defensively confiding that actually, the internet is culture – possibly an effect of having spent much of her career writing about television, but somewhat alien to those of us who prefer a less tormented and tumultuous stance toward the digital world.

For all that, I quite like some of the individual pieces, and some of the ideas are quite interesting. Her defense of reading was quite good (spoiler: reading the internet is reading, and there's no particular reason we should mourn the death of the novel). She says:

In fact the signature pastime of the American consumer is now the mental act of processing digital, symbolic data: watching videos, graphics, maps, and images; listening to music and sound cues; and above all reading. ... With media, books, texts, and emails on mobile devices people are never not reading. We read while we're socializing, working, shopping, relaxing, walking, commuting, urinating. From a nation that couldn't stop eating, we've become a nation that can't stop reading. As day follows night, our current form of overconsuming might be overreading. Hyperlexia. Reading texts while driving. Reading Facebook instead of sleeping. Buying multiple copies of books from Amazon, in print and digital form, as if to treat panic about future word famine, an imagined dystopia without text to read.

“Now that superstylized images have become the answer to “How are you?” and “What are you doing?” we can avoid the ruts of linguistic expression in favor of a highly forgiving, playful, and compassionate style of looking. ... Instagram, if you use it right, will stealthily persuade you that other humans, and nature, and food, and three-dimensional objects more generally are worth observing for the sheer joy of it. This little app has delivered a gorgeous reminder, one well worth at least $1 billion: Life is beautiful, and it goes by fast.”

The great-man producers of our own time, Katzman explained, were no longer the raconteurs of stage and screen, permitting viewers the fantasy that they were John Wayne or Cate Blanchett. Rather the new great-man producers were creating platforms that would permit others the fantasy of auteurism. ... If you owned YouTube, the storytellers were the audience, the consumers. The storyteller was no longer controlling things. The great-man storyteller was, in fact, the new chump, the new sucker, the one who would pay. Telling stories was no longer producing; it was consuming—bandwidth, technology, platform space, code.

If nausea is the body's dysphoric response to the uncanny, presence is the euphoric one. ... Virtual reality sickness, la nausée, can be seen as the body's radical disbelief in this illusion. It surfaces to remind you, in horror, of your subjectivity and to force you to reclaim your sensory autonomy.