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Among my corner of the internet, there’s been lots of discussion about, well, the internet. What it’s doing to us. How it is, incontrovertibly, rotting our brains. Here’s John Ganz offering a confession:
Why not just ignore people who annoy you? That’s a good question. The problem is that I spend too much time on social media. It’s like being caged with other animals. I see them doing their thing, it starts to annoy me, I am bored and irritated, and then I begin to bite and scratch.
Over on her newsletter, friend of the ‘stack B.D. McClay has begun taking notes toward her conception of ‘loser theory,’ an umbrella that includes just about everyone online: “losers are the people who don’t get famous and don’t get rich,” she writes, and I wince in recognition, time spent online having given me unfettered access to the doings of those richer and famouser than me (ie, everyone). Brandon Taylor recently wrote about Internet Novels—namely, Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler and No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood—finding the whole subgenre rather Gothic, in a racially specific way: “The Internet Novel captures some of the weird Gothic horror that white people have come, by way of their new digital Calvinism, to accept as being inherent to digital life.”
All this has made me reflect—wistfully, righteously, piteously—on my time spent online, and on how, Extremely Online as I am, I still don’t quite feel like I belong here. Here’s what I mean: the dominant mode of engagement with Onlineland, particularly in the age of social media, is as a conversation. Post, tweet, argue, flame, troll, thread: these are the transitive verbs of online, taking anime avatars as their object. Myself, though, I’m still not fully conversant in this aspect of Onlinespeak. My follower count proves this. I’ve been on Twitter since 2014 and only have (furiously opens tab) 739 followers. Your average 20 year old could create an account right now and rack up more followers than that in the time it takes me to finish writing this sentence.
“Why is my follower count so low?” he asked like an emotionally stable person. Rhetoric, yes, but I believe there’s an answer. I, Old Millennial, do not see the internet as a conversation; I see it as a library. Je suis Things-Knower. I open tabs, I browse, I tumble down rabbit holes: this, for me, is the baseline of my internet experience. Hoover up all the information I possibly can, for…what, exactly? Possible use in an as-yet-unwritten novel? Many a time have I come across an interesting factoid and thought to myself “that’s going in the Gesamstkunstwerk!” like a twerpy Pynchon.
It’s always been this way for me and the internet. Even back in 2007, the Last Good Year of the Internet, I spent plenty of time on lit blogs, following the latest dustups. There was Flarf Vs. Conceptual Poetry over on Silliman’s Blog. The Great Deadgod Wars of HTMLGiant. But though I read these blogs, and countless others, I never blogged. Never added to a comment thread. Never posted screeds calling out feckless interlopers. Honestly, it didn’t occur to me. And even if it had, I don’t know what I would have had to say.
So how did I wind up on Twitter, encased in the amber oozing out of Jack Dorsey’s beard? Friends, basically. I knew some people on there, people I rarely saw otherwise. Plus, I was stuck at home all day, taking care of a baby, and Twitter provided me with adult interaction that was in rather short supply. Even then, the kind of stuff I tweet, the kind of stuff that ‘drives engagement’ as they say, were rarely takes, or opinions, or perspectives. They were jokes. Extremely dumb jokes. That’s long been my go-to move in social settings: intuit the basic rules of an exchange, and offer parodies for the amusement of others. Granted, that approach does not work as well in some settings. The conservative evangelicalism of my youth, for example, has to be the most sincere, most earnest, least ironic environment I’ve ever encountered, and my knowing winks and asides never went over well in those settings. Twitter, though! No shortage of irony there!
But that approach to Onlinespeak makes me a gadfly for whatever conversation is going on, rather than the one driving or redirecting conversations. Which would be fine, honestly, if it weren’t for a nagging worry—justified or not—that speaking Online, racking up followers, is necessary to be a writer. To have Success. I don’t think I’m alone in that worry, either.
Anyway! I’m going to do that old blogging move I often read where you end abruptly before embarrassing yourself further. Salud.
This month’s link comes from a YouTube called SNES Drunk, which is devoted to appraising old Super Nintendo games. Basically, my own personal Proustian madeleine. Check out the account if you’re in the mood for some serious early 90s techno-nostalgia
i relate to the internet in the same way, as a library more than a conversation, but i wish if we had to have conversations (we do, i think. us being human) they could be done in smaller, niche communities rather than trying to sort through the bullshit being pummeled at you by the whole world on large social media sites