Book Review
Magic And Loss: The Internet As Art
By Virginia Heffernan
“For years technology had seemed to be the masculine form of the word culture. If you wanted to sell men on a culture story, you did well to frame it as a tech story[.]”
— Virginia Heffernan
One book I recommend often to randos is Steven Johnson’s “How We Got to Now.” The story that I sell it with is about mirrors. Johnson writes about the Italian engineers that figured out how to shape glass into mirrors, then suddenly Italian artists became obsessed with self-portrait as an art form. Other societies hadn’t invented purely reflective mirrors yet, so didn’t have a self-portraiture art movement.
That story demonstrates one of Johnson’s big theses about how technology influences culture. Both figuratively and literally, the invention of mirrors altered our perspective on the world.
“Magic and Loss” takes that thesis a few steps further. Technology and culture are locked in a feedback loop, Heffernan posits, with technology shaping the way we see the world, shaping the art we make, which then inspires the new technology we build. The slick way to say this is that the Internet is a giant collaborative art project. But the implication that resonated with me is how the tools of literary criticism that academia has built up can help illuminate the Internet. Literary criticism can help us understand what the Web means to people, and what it’s saying about us.
The book is split up into six chapters: “Design,” “Text,” “Images,” “Video,” “Music,” and “Even if You Don’t Believe It.” The first five engage in an art history analysis of the media forms of the Internet. The last is a philosophical history.
One cross-cutting themes of the book is the parallels between food and media consumption. “With media, books, texts, and emails on mobile devices people are never not reading…From a nation that couldn’t stop eating, we’ve become a nation that can’t stop reading.” I was reminded of Renaissance art where chubbiness implied wealth, compared to modern art where thinness implies wealth. In modern culture, we’re obsessed with “real” food versus “fake” food. Similarly, we’re reading all the time (“hyperlexia” as Heffernan denotes it) but we’re obsessed with “real” reading versus “fake” reading. We market new “wholesome” modes of reading on the Web like the açai berry, and hardcover print books like a paleo diet.
You can probably see how this discussion bleeds into how we think about social class. Heffernan describes one critic’s view: “Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens…that keep the din of the Web far away.” Heffernan’s own views are more humanist and appreciative of both high art and low art. But she acknowledges the ways that the design of the Web communicates class hierarchies.
I laughed out loud at her dissection of how we carefully curate images of kids and family for social media. “Pictures of kids, like idealized Victorian boys and girls, can be seen and not heard.”
As we start thinking about the Web like we think about literature, maybe we’ll get super navel-gazey about it. Some days, I read more Twitter, some days I read more books. Is Twitter a more healthy view of the world, where I get the collective wisdom of many viewpoints? Is the book better because it explores the implications of a singular vision? Or am I being too judgey about whether a form of media is “good” or not? Am I criticizing my reading habits because I care, or am I performing for others what I think an thoughtful person would write?
Ugh, literary criticism is exhausting.
