Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony to Congress in Washington last week was a grim reminder of many things, not least how far from Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of the world wide web we have come. “Personalisation” and “connection” have become euphemisms for surveillance as advertisers and the companies behind the internet close in on us. Last month, many people nobly promised to quit Facebook in valedictory status updates; several weeks later, most of them are back, quietly returning to the duplicitous partner who vows they’ll change. As former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris has been warning us for years, the medium is designed to be addictive, to manipulate us in the same way that slot machines work on gambling addicts. The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present is wryly referred to as “a self-help book” by its impressive triumvirate of authors: Douglas Coupland, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Shumon Basar. First published in 2015, this slim paperback features a glossary of invented words that describe how our inner lives, and indeed the planet, have been restructured by our immersion in digital technology. This is a compelling extension of the ideas that Marshall McLuhan set forth in his 1967 bestseller, The Medium Is the Massage (his title was originally “message”, but McLuhan loved the irony of the typesetter’s mistake and kept it).
Novels are under threat from the internet, we’re told, as attention spans become shorter. But the digital world is also inspiring novelists. Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010) is set in a near-future dystopian New York: the US has become ungovernable; books and privacy are anachronisms; everyone owns a device that can live-stream thoughts (a version of this has since been created at MIT) and enables a fully quantified self, from health to hotness. Shteyngart seizes on nascent fears of online addiction and the internet’s dark side. Revisiting it now, the book reads less like science fiction, more like an account of a Faustian pact we’ve already made.
Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (2015) manages to be addictive reading – as compulsive as any online newsfeed – while distancing itself from the hysteria social media can induce. It demonstrates a nuanced and well-balanced analysis of our online behaviour.
Meanwhile, Olivia Laing’s Lonely City: The Adventures and Art of Being Alone (2016) merges memoir and essay to electric effect, whether she is describing the isolation of a Edward Hopper figure behind glass, or the author behind the glow of her computer screen. Her writing burns with that longing for connection that exists at its most acute in crowded cities such as New York. Having recently gone through a break-up in the book, Laing finds comfort in online communities, but she is also sensitive to their contradictions; her craving for a connection is tempered by her creeping awareness of surveillance and her growing hypervigilance.
Laing has clearly read Alone Together (2011) by psychologist Sherry Turkle, who has been writing about internet culture for three decades, with other studies on digital addiction including Life on the Screen, The Second Self and Reclaiming the Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age. Like Emma Gannon, the author of the excellent memoir Ctrl, Alt, Delete (2016), I am nearly the same age as the internet and had taken for granted its power over my life. Turkle was my gateway drug, aged 24, into thinking critically about my behaviour and the medium designed to hold me captive.
- Olivia Sudjic’s Sympathy is published in paperback by Pushkin. To order a copy for £7.64, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
