The Felt Internet
Highlights from Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art
Consuming art [on the Internet] feels like truancy, like something shady, something you shouldn’t be doing. And this is the best effect art can have. — Virginia Heffernan
Three weeks ago, a book arrived at my apartment. The book was made of paper. This initially stymied me. I do almost all of my book-reading when it’s dark out, on screens that light themselves. When I woke early each morning and went to open a book, the one I most wanted to read was stubbornly solid and dim. And even under lamplight, how was I supposed to highlight passages in a way that would make them easy to extract later? I progressed in dribs and drabs, constructing my own page flags out of torn washi tape.
Then, a long weekend showed up, and there I was: plummeting down the hypnotizing k-hole that is Virginia Heffernan’s new book, Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art.
Sifted into slanted chapters— “Design,” “Text,” “Images,” “Video,” and “Music”—Heffernan’s powers of observation and free association created space for me to reflect on my own internet experiences at some distance. Interestingly, though, the distance wasn’t always so great. Heffernan’s accounts of picking up a Kindle, slipping into a fugue state induced by following endless links, or thumbing an iPod wheel didn’t just resonate with my experiences; they were my experiences. Reading Magic and Loss made my memories of the internet new again.
The book isn’t flawless. Adjectives and commas abound, and the book’s dreaminess made it hard to focus on at points. But even the aspects I found flawed mirrored the true nature of the internet as art. It’s vivid; it snaps in and out of focus; comma-separated values rule the day. It’s about how it feels. And it feels good.
If the time you spend on the internet is important to you, Magic and Loss will be important to you, too. I recommend it completely.
Read on for the passages that stuck with me, then buy the book and see what sticks with you.
The Web’s Aesthetic
The Web’s aesthetic might be called late-stage Atlantic City or early-stage Mall of America. Eighties network television. Cacophonous palette, ad hoc everything, unbidden ads forever rampaging through one’s field of vision, to be batted or tweezed away like ticks bearing Lyme disease. — Virginia Heffernan
The Magnetism of Mobile Games
I find pleasing magic in the design of many digital and digitized games: Angry Birds, WordBrain, Bejeweled, Candy Crush. But I use their graphic worlds to keep myself safe from unstructured experience. To shut out mayhem and calm my mind. Often I find I want to keep the parameters of boredom and frustration narrow. I feel I need to confront rigged cartoonish challenges that, as it happens, you can—with pleasurable effort—perfectly meet. Games, like nothing else, give me a break from the feeling that I’m either too dumb or too smart for this world. — Virginia Heffernan
Apps as Bottled Water
Many apps are to the web what bottled water is to tap: an inventive and proprietary new way of decanting, packaging, and pricing something that could be had for free. — Virginia Heffernan
Poetry’s Pervasiveness
Poetry on the Internet has shot far past relevancy through indispensability and finally to vaporization. Poetry is the air we damn well breathe. — Virginia Heffernan
The Evanescence of Attention Spans
As night follows day the shortness of tweets conjures the standing sophistry around our “attention span,” an occult feature of the mind that in theory is as fixed as a boxer’s reach. But the attention span is always invoked as a thing deformed and on closer examination surely does not exist, except as always already julienned. — Virginia Heffernan
The Pleasures of Lurking
When I lurk [online], I relax, fall silent, become a cosseted baroness whose electronic servants bring her funny pictures and distracting tales. I have no responsibilities. I’m entirely on intake. — Virginia Heffernan
Poison and MFAs
An art form or cultural practice thrives to the degree that it is considered poisonous; by contrast, it’s ailing when there are MFA programs in it. — Virginia Heffernan
Images vs. Words
Now that superstylized images have become the answer to “How are you?” and “What are you doing?” we can avoid the ruts of linguistic expression in favor of a highly forgiving, playful, and compassionate style of looking. When we live only in language—in tweets and status updates, in zingers, analysis, and debate—we come to imagine the world to be much uglier than it is. — Virginia Heffernan
Consumption, Inverted
[Starting with YouTube], the storyteller was no longer controlling things. The great-man storyteller was, in fact, the new chump, the new sucker, the one who would pay. Telling stories was no longer producing; it was consuming—bandwidth, technology, platform, space, code. And the storyteller was the consumer who would eat what you fed him and pay for more. If the storyteller used to be feeding consumers stories, now it was the man with the system who was feeding storytellers bandwidth. — Virginia Heffernan
Whims and Obsessions, Through the Looking Glass
Digitization has sifted images and sounds into bits: they are one and the same. And at every turn (Tidal, Vine, Snapchat) the temptation to turn a whim into an obsession is hard to resist. The only act that’s impossible is consuming art the old way: treating the Internet like a record collection that might be dipped into with a balance of equanimity and curiosity. We’re officially through the looking glass, everyone; we might as well stop to smell the music and hear the new air. — Virginia Heffernan
Magic and Loss is out now. My thanks to Virginia for answering an out-of-the-blue Twitter DM with the gift of a pre-publication copy. Next time, I’ll be ready with page flags!
Now, I want to know:
What’s the first internet rabbit hole you can remember tumbling down? Where were you when you first felt its magic? What are your earliest memories of digital loss?
To respond, scroll down to the Responses section and start typing. To turn your response into a full post, click “Go full screen.” I can’t wait to read what you have to say!
p.s. Here for the giveaway? All ten copies are spoken for, but Virginia Heffernan and I are still inhaling every response.
