When www Trumps IRL
Why it’s now impossible (irresponsible?) to pretend the internet is somehow less real Molly Sauter
the digital world from a primarily aesthetic perspective, and in doing so ignores its social and political realities. On the other hand, The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online, by Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner, is more willing to grapple with the full spectrum of human realities present online, from different perspectives and with different levels of success.
Despite its grand title, in Magic and Loss: The Internet As Art, Heffernan isn’t actually writing about the internet: she’s writing about the aesthetics of digital technology, primarily interfaces and user experience design, or “UX.” She’s more interested in the design of the smartphone game Monument Valley and the design of the iPod than the technical protocols that allow networked systems to function. Heffernan argues that digital technologies, and the internet as a whole, are best described as “representational art,” and are robbing us of meaningful human connection. This is a fundamentally shallow reading of networked technology and the culture that has grown up within it.
Heffernan’s argument that the internet offers only representational connection neuters the history of connec- of the internet hadn’t yet become an inflamed boil on the body politic, as they would in September, October and November. It’s not surprising that Heffernan doesn’t address them. But the events surrounding the U. S. election now make her choice to focus primarily on the aesthetic dimensions of digital technology to the exclusion of the political, seem a glaring omission rather than an intellectual choice.
Heffernan’s treatment of Twitter and Facebook, the behemoths of the social web, is oddly cursory. The evolution of Facebok’s News Feed or the impact of the anti- chronological turn in social media would appear to provide poor fodder for a book primarily interested in the internet as “representational art.” Heffernan saddles the vibrant social media network Twitter with the backhanded compliment of “poetic,” compares it to the “admiring Bog” of the Emily Dickinson poem, and insists that it is primarily a “publisher.” She touches briefly on hashtags and humour, but leaves what is powerful and compelling about these networks unexplained. Where she might have addressed the communitarian nature of social media virality, or weirdness of “late night twitter,” or the “Eastern Standard as the social web’s “yes and” nature: incredible collaboration projects like Wikipedia and spectacularly obscene collectively generated memes featuring Donald Duck and the Berenstain Bears; the freedom that anonymous self-expression can engender and the harassment it sometimes allows; the connectivity the internet allows and the disturbingly antisocial behaviour that connectivity can sometimes encourage.
Phillips and Milner are deeply knowledgeable about their subject, and make strong arguments for the social and political value of scholarly attention devoted to what might appear to be opaque in- jokes passed around imgur (pizza hair Beyoncé, anyone?). This is unsurprising given their recent publishing history: Phillips’s previous book, This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, was one of the first major books to take the study of the socially grey internet seriously. Milner’s The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media tackled memes in a similarly rigorous way.
By approaching their topic from folklore studies, Phillips and Milner never have to apologize for or obscure the the bizarre, sometimes simultaneously. Phillips and Milner argue that by starting at the margins, and doing what they call, after anthropologist Mary Douglas, the “dirt work,” we can learn more about how the social internet is creating and impacting culture, including political culture. The margins reveal the centre, and “how much fracture the center obscures.” Anyone attempting to grasp the current moment and the internet’s role in it would do well to have Phillips and Milner as their guides.
The 2016 U.S. election represents a watershed moment for the way we as a broad society understand networked technologies. We can no longer act like the internet and all the networked digital technologies that run on and around it somehow “don’t count.” Its harms and virtues are as real as anything occurring offline, and the positions that “it’s just the internet” and “you can just sign off and it will go away” are no longer defensible. In order to be useful, tech criticism must represent an honest attempt to wrangle with the whole of what we have wrought through digital technology, not simply an effort to mash the internet into a familiar anodyne box.