Virginia Heffernan and the Case for the Internet as Art
The first installment of This Month in Mind-Bending, a monthly meditation on works of literature, film, and new media that blend different disciplines and genres to expand our notions of what a work of art can be and do.
After reading Virginia Heffernan’s Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art, I was moved to contemplate these interconnected computer networks as forms of artistic output and sources of much mesmerism and even mourning.
I was also obliged to recall my teenage reverence for fiery, fictitious female hackers, such as the one Sandra Bullock played in The Net and the one Angelina Jolie played in Hackers. Evidently, my view on what my parents refer to as the “Interweb” was substantially influenced by films that came out in 1995. Right around the rise of the modern Internet and its concomitant exhilaration and angst, this year actually makes sense as a genesis for this sort of fixation. One offshoot of this Internet-oriented excitement and anxiety that both The Net and Hackers played on was the newly minted threat and allure of hackers — those cyberspace outlaws who understood the Web in ways you didn’t and could therefore probably take over the world.
Full disclosure: The Net was not a brilliant film tech-wise. To illustrate this, Chris Sims makes the salient point that “the most important and prominent use of technology on display in this movie is the ability to order a pizza online without ever speaking to another person.” Although the capacity to order snacks without having to socialize verges on brilliance in my book, it’s not quite there, as I think Chris Sims would agree. And I confess that, though Hackers had more cult appeal than The Net, what really drew me to the film was my magical (and what I recognize now as Heffernanian) belief that by watching it obsessively I could become as cool, comely, and computer-savvy as Kate Libby. Full full disclosure: this plan was unsuccessful. I never became a hacker; instead, what I mostly did was play Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?
All jesting aside, Heffernan’s book is, indeed, thought-provoking. She chronicles the Internet’s mystical qualities (magic) as well as its doing away with our old way of thinking and being (loss). It’s clear that Heffernan experiences the Web’s magnificence more than its call for mourning, as she is (pretty much admittedly) a techie fangirl — which is by no means a bad thing when the fangirl is as informed and ingenious as Heffernan.
Heffernan contrasts this sense of technological magic and loss most vividly when exploring the subject of poetry in the Internet age. She plays her ultimate conclusion on the topic — “Asking what’s to become of poetry in the age of Twitter is like asking what’s to become of music in the age of guitars” — against the opposing perspective. She gives voice to this divergent viewpoint most memorably when quoting poet DeSales Harrison: “Speed reading apps deny the existence of white space, line breaks, the idea of the page…#deathofpoetry.” Yet that Harrison tweeted this pronouncement draws us back to the very tension Heffernan highlights throughout the book: Harrison declares the death of poetry on a social networking site that’s regularly blamed for this very demise.
For me, as both poet and (adjunct) professor who has struggled for years to get Freshmen to think poetry’s cool, I’m not concerned that there aren’t enough Emily Dickinsons coming out of Twitter. I’m too busy focusing on the fact that what my parents refer to as “youngsters” are engaging in poetry at all — and not just reading it, but writing it. Although I realize this is not a popular opinion in academia, I’m not gonna lie: it warms my heart to see Twitter mass producing young poets.
To be sure, as my aforementioned attraction to Hackers and The Net illustrates, there was something about this mystifying “Interweb” that captivated my own youthful imagination — and specifically my writerly imagination. Heffernan’s argument for a digitally transformed reading process helped me put my finger on what that something might be. As opposed to the once passive, one-way activity, Heffernan conceives of digitally influenced reading as an interactive, massively creative, networked escapade, a “reading-writing” or “participatory reading.”
She identifies this more active process, this “reading-writing,” as a peculiarly American one (“Americans read with highlighters…We underline, copy quotations, pull excerpts, produce decks, compose reviews”) and a supposedly polluted one (“This…reading has come to be regarded as impure reading”). Ultimately, though, she revolts against the perceived debasement of reading in the digital sphere. “True, readers might not read the way writers and publishers have laboriously mapped for them,” she writes, “but watch someone with a laptop determined to put together a biography of Lou Reed for himself and you’ll see what focus and determination look like.”
If you’ve never gone on a late-night-Wikipedia-surfing-bender, then you won’t get this last comment, but if you have, you’re nodding your head in recognition, perhaps having woken up looking like you got loaded last night, with nothing but the Internet to blame. As Heffernan rightly implies, this reading-writing or participatory-reading is not a passive or polite activity; it is reading reimagined as raucous off-road adventure. What I’m saying is you might click on some porn along the way, or you might pen a masterpiece, and either way the trip will have been well-worth it.
The possibility of porn is part, but not all, of the potential for impurity to which Heffernan refers vis-à-vis Internet-related reading. Some of this impurity derives from the Internet’s invasion of privacy. As she puts it, the Net is “an artwork” and “without doubt what video gamers call an MMORPG: a massively multiplayer online role-playing game.” But she later deepens this point when she considers why the concept of the Web as MMORPG makes us both exited and nervous: “You think you’re reading when you’re on the Web; in fact you’re being read.”
She then takes this a step further still. Heffernan claims the Internet hasn’t merely turned her from reader to writer, viewer to auteur; it has digitized her. That is to say, under the spell of digital life, she has transformed into her passion. In the end, Heffernan’s notion that the digital sphere is magical is an almost literal one: “But the iPod, shooting bit by bit into my very brain, was digitizing me…Nicholas Negroponte had enjoined readers to embrace our status as information bits rather than atoms of matter. Sure enough, I was somehow becoming the thing I was studying.” In short, Heffernan’s Internet is not the thing you laboriously dialed up in high school to write your research papers. Rather, it’s an ecstatic, imaginative octopus with expressive tentacles that reproduce at an astounding rate. Even cooler, it performs the great miracle of making writers out of readers.
