In many ways, Jia Tolentino is the perfect person to critique our contemporary internet-driven culture. Her rise as a journalist coincided with the era in which lines blurred between regular media and social media, creating a voracious, attention-craving monster hungry for our eyeballs. Writers like her became inextricably tied to the internet at a time when it grew harder for them to stand out in an increasingly competitive media landscape. Tolentino also lives in New York City, one of the most competitive places on Earth. And as a feminist writer working at publications like Jezebel and The Hairpin over the past decade, she has been uniquely positioned to comment on some of the defining internet-fueled moments/movements of our age, including Gamergate and #MeToo.
What struck me most on my first read of Tolentino’s new collection of essays, Trick Mirror, was the amount of thematic overlap between her book and Un-Plugged-In. One thing she crystalized for me was the idea of the early internet versus the internet we know today; she describes the internet of the ’90s—the internet of our both our childhoods—as an idealized, informational Eden. It was a place where people gathered “in open forums, drawn, like butterflies, to the puddles and blossoms of other people’s curiosity and expertise.”
That was web 1.0, a not-so-social internet where joy came through discovery that took place mainly in private, like quality time spent at your very own virtual Walden Pond. Today’s overly social internet, by contrast, is filled with “mazes of incessant forced connection.” It has become a “feverish, electric, unlivable hell.”
It actually comes as a coincidence that the parallel timelines of Un-Plugged-In align so well with the two eras Tolentino demarcates so vividly. I was looking for a symmetric marker around the introduction of what I saw as the most defining technology of our era, the smartphone, and a decade before/after felt right to me. But there is no doubt that both technologies—social media and smartphones—worked together to create the internet as we know it today—one she labels as so “confining, so inescapably personal, [and] so politically determinative.” In her book Tolentino asks: how did we get from there to here?
Tolentino details five different mechanisms that transformed the internet into its current form. I won’t go into all of them here, but I do highly recommend picking up a copy of her book and reading them yourself; her analysis is entertaining and on point. But it’s the first phenomenon she articulates, the “distention of identity,” that has perhaps the clearest parallel with Un-Plugged-In.
Her analysis begins with sociologist Erving Goffman’s seminal work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In the book, Goffman argues that our identities are like the performances of an actor onstage. Critical to our wellbeing in such an environment is the existence of a “backstage,” a place where we don’t feel such immense pressure to perform—a refuge where we can feel comfortable and relax. In our current era, Tolentino argues there is no longer any backstage. “Online, your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end.”
In Un-Plugged-In, this point rings literally true for Jamie, one of the main characters of the story. When she’s introduced in the book, it’s the night of the premiere of her solo show at the college where she’s studying as a theatre major. In both the ’90s and present-day versions of the story, she has just performed to a packed house. In the ’90s version, this is enough to make her happy, but in the present-day version, she’s upset that the love-fest has not continued on social media—at least not in the way she was expecting; she’d received less likes than she had for past productions in which she’d played a starring role.
“In physical spaces, there’s a limited audience and time span for every performance… Online, performance is mostly arrested in the nebulous realm of sentiment, through an unbroken stream of hearts and likes and eyeballs, aggregated in numbers attached to your name.”
It’s another coincidence that Jamie’s character is an actress and that Goffman’s theory is couched in the language of theatre. I pictured Jamie as a performer because I wanted someone with a credible reason to care what other people thought about her. But Tolentino’s analysis applies perfectly here: if your audience can keep expanding forever, and if you care deeply about how big your audience is, then you’ll never be satisfied. Back in the web 1.0 era, it was different; there was a sense in which ignorance was bliss.
So where do we go from here? This is where Tolentino and I may differ a little bit. The internet may be driven by capitalism as she argues, but Tolentino sees the social web as something of a “final stage,” since it has infiltrated “our identities and relationships” and because “capitalism has no land left to cultivate but the self.” My issue here isn’t that I know the real answer—only that I am wary of labeling anything as “final” when it comes to technology. Technology is constantly advancing, and we simply don’t know how people and new advancements in technology will interact to create the next step in our techno-cultural evolution. This was actually something I struggled with in the writing of Un-Plugged-In: why bother to write it if something could come along tomorrow and make it all irrelevant?
Ultimately, like Tolentino, I do believe something significant has changed in the last twenty years—enough, at least, for a story. It might soon come off as a dated, quaint exercise, but in the meantime, hopefully like Trick Mirror it’ll be a fun read.
Published on August 29, 2019