let's make a list of fiction that's "about" life online and then not poll it bcz polls are for babies and also they suck

here's my baby-steps starter list (i haven't read any of these and i'm sure there's tons more)

Natasha Stagg: Surveys (2016)
Patrica Lockwood: Nobody Is Talking About This (2021)
Lauren Oyler: Fake Accounts (2021)

obviously we can discuss and debate the titles we've read and also (bcz this will be more objective) the titles we haven't read

FWIW, Keith Gessen's ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN (2008) is also slightly relevant here as an earlier case. The book is perhaps not quite as terrible as its title.

Jarett Kobek, I HATE THE INTERNET (2016).

My sense is that all these books are terrible but this automatically means that Mark S, who will actually read them, will reach a different conclusion.

"who will actually read them"

^^^citation needed

These people are incredible whingers who are obsessed with writing at massive length, in sarcastic world-weary tones, about how they hate Twitter and are always on Twitter. It all seems worse in the US than UK, fwiw.

― the pinefox, Wednesday, 11 August 2021 11:03 (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^^from the LRB thread

gnna jump in straight off and argue that LENGTH has become a shaping structural (political-economic) factor in this tendency: (some of) "these ppl" are GOOD AT TWEETS (as readers and as writers) but guess what you don't get from this skill?

i: the respect of yr elders (you get the ironised respect of yr peers viz other shitposters but who wants that
ii: you don't paid!! in early career especially, the payment model for writing is way more locked into length than quality

hence the genuine skills and sensibility of this milieu have to be painstakingly translated into a format ("the novel") which swamps and probably just destroys them

Remember around the turn of the millennium when there was loads of multimedia fiction, or whatever it was called, projects trying to turn the web experience into a medium in its own right, not sure this ever worked, certainly people seemed to give up on it completely by 2005 or so.

i bet the lockwood book is good

the rest, nuh uh

then again i’m writing a novel i’ll never finish that the internet doesn’t figure into at all, so who’s the real loser

what happened to mark leyner

(i could look this up yes i choose not to)

I'm not up to date with current SF etc, but there must be some examples of genre fiction about this too (and of course things like Neuromancer are in some ways early iterations of extremely online fiction)

I guess the final part of Welcome to the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan qualifies as speculative fiction about the online life - maybe The Circle by David Eggers too?

ugh the last chapter of goon squad, the worst

Yes - the badness of the Egan chapter and the whole of the Eggers seems tied to how simple-mindedly dystopian they are, and how they read like special pleading by the authors (WILL NO ONE THINK OF THE BOOKS???) But I"m not sure I know what a utopian vision would be ...

oh wait i think i get to say
PIP
POP
BIM
BAM

and then cite THE DEMOLISHED MAN and espers as a prescient figure for twitter

i shd add that -- while i am usually very PRO the expansion of the literary space to include genre fiction -- in this instance i think the usual (and usually bad) demarcation lines might be worth firmly attending to, bcz it's the introduction of the topic into high literary fiction that is creating the issue

obviously only an insane person wd called mark leyner high literary fiction so everyone can ignore this demarcation if they like

"i was an infinitely hot and dense dot"

Super Sad True Love Story fits in this genre too but I found it unreadable :/

Also Tao Lin, also unreadable :(

These people are incredible whingers who are obsessed with writing at massive length, in sarcastic world-weary tones, about how they hate Twitter and are always on Twitter. It all seems worse in the US than UK, fwiw.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 11 August 2021 11:03 (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Lockwood and Oyler's last novels are about 200 pages. Their pieces are bog-standard LRB length so I think you are hallucinating the size of it, for a start.

some of those pieces are not not assemblages of tweet ideas

here's my next very good and correct theory: every single dril tweet is its own stand-alone novel, you know im right abt this

not making a claim abt the quality of these novels btw

Fernando Sdrigotti: Shitstorm (2019)

Think I might have to read this to check it isn't a joke

There is Stacy P., who accuses the President of the United States of America of sexual misconduct, and Keith the Nazi schoolboy, cause célèbre one minute then milkshake duck the next. There is the TV chef Marion Berry, and the Independent columnist Judith Burchill, and the concerned celebrities Maria Farrow and Danny Gervais, and the left wing blogger Owen James and the right wing blogger Brandon O’Neill.

keith the nazi starmboy

sdrigotti is a grebt name btw

Incidentally, fwiw: my own brief statement, quoted by Mark S above, was primarily about people writing non-fiction in n+1 -- as I happened to have been sent two long whingeing articles of this kind, from that site, in two days.

That is part of a broader picture, though, for sure.

yes sorry i shd have been clearer -- it seemed to illuminate the broader issue so i just C&Ped it out of its specific context (critical essays in N+1 and the LRB) and into this thread (fiction abt being online)

which we shd carry on listing btw and dont let me derail my own thread as i always do

No worries, it’s an OP’s prerogative to do so.

indeed but i actually want ppl to do the listing so do that plz

It's generous of Mark S to say that I have illuminated a broader issue.
I am appreciative.

On further examination, this -

hence the genuine skills and sensibility of this milieu have to be painstakingly translated into a format ("the novel") which swamps and probably just destroys them

looks a plausible hypothesis.

Note on the topic:

"Technological determinism" has long been devalued, rightly or not -- mainly by the claim that "actually social relations determine what happens to Technology", or something.

With a form like Twitter it strikes me that something else arises - a ... Techno-Culturalism? -- which basically involves the idea that the technology lends itself to certain kinds of expression, thought, feeling, personality, style.

So it would be easy for almost anyone eg: on this thread to say, not only what Twitter is technically like (it has a certain number of characters), but what it is eg: tonally like; how people write on it and what they express.

Yet ... there is something narrow about this, a kind of TechnoCulturalist determinism maybe - as there is not really any need for the tech form of Twitter to carry those feelings and style.

In some ways Twitter is just another medium like the letter or the postcard, or even the pen and paper - yet the idea of it has become thoroughly bound up with the aesthetics of how it has happened to come to be used. Which is understandable, but also something that people thinking hard about it should think around and outside of.

When eg: a novelist writes recursively, ironically, despairingly "about Twitter" they are, I suppose, really writing about a certain (actually limited) group of people at a certain time. But there are lots of other people. In theory, given the chance, they might use the tech differently.

in general (as the author of several pieces plus notes towards a deplorably massive still unfinished book on the history of music and technology) i wd argue that the "devaluation" of the concept of "technological determinism" has been a flight from a useful materialist concpetion of criticism towards idealist faff

what if the arrival of social media -- maybe not just twitter itself, but the ecology of interlocked social medias -- is as colossal a social experiment as was the arrival of the post-gutenberg book? even if yr arguing no it isn't, i think the case for this claim has to be engaged with seriously

I'm not arguing that, myself, one way or another! (Unsure if you're saying I am.)

re: scale / quantitative claims ('colossal'), well, you might want to start with quantities of users and publications (eg: there have been far more social media users in the last 15 years than there were book readers in, what, 1500).

I was trying to make a specific observation: that discussions of social media, especially literature about it, tends to ascribe cultural qualities to social media, which are real but not really inevitable.

We know that there are many kinds of book. Why don't we know that there are many kinds of Tweet?

Because there aren't? Because there couldn't be? Because 'bubbles' stop us seeing groups we're not so familiar with? Because we're not imaginative enough?

i wasn't saying you were, no -- more just knee-jerk reacting against a term that i associate with a muffling of the better ways of thinking abt this

i don't disagree with other things yr saying :)

there are several types of tweet certainly, not sure if i'd say "many" -- and in ref "quantities", absolute numbers are only part of the story, you also have to look at proportion (readers as a fraction of the whole, tweeters as a fraction of the whole), but i think there's a LOT of other things you'd have to look at before a readable comparison emerged

I think the notion I have been getting at is something like:

Discussions of tech, like social media, seem to involve tech determinism (say: 'Twitter reduces everything')
But the tech itself can't really determine the content to the extent that seems implied by the kind of commentators (eg n+1) we've been referring to
But something does, rather than just isolated individuals
So there must be some kind of mediating term of "technocultural determinism", "the cultures of a technology" --

all of which, in a sense, explains nothing more rarified than why so many people tweet in the same way.

There is a kind of 'determination' going on that is bound up with tech and media forms but not reducible to them. The other element is then 'culture' ie: habitus, habits, taste, 'styles of affect', etc.

Part of my notion is that though these last are pervasive, they are less innate to the technology than seems to be implied.

Anecdotal note that slightly relates:

I now recall that years ago, I heard a lecturer of some kind say "emails are affectless - no-one is moved by them as they were by letters". Something like that.

I found this preposterous and in some way said so. Because of course whatever someone says in an email might or might not be just as emotional, uplifting, devastating, etc, as whatever they might have written in a letter.

I suspect that his point (if I'm not just wildly misremembering it) seems even more daft now than it did then, over a decade ago. (Why? I think because emails may now, to many, seem relatively august and serious like letters!)

So - I suggest that you could extend this principle to other tech - in which case you wouldn't start from propositions like "Twitter automatically flattens everything" - which might be just as daft as that statement about emails.

And a question could then be eg: where did the "flattening" idea come from and why did everyone start believing and repeating it?

I'm not up to date with current SF etc, but there must be some examples of genre fiction about this too (and of course things like Neuromancer are in some ways early iterations of extremely online fiction)

FTR William Gibson has only mentioned Twitter in one of his books (he has a character create a Twitter account that only allows one other person to follow it, and uses it for stealth back-and-forth messaging) but does have characters using various phone apps for things. His characters mostly go out of their way to not live online and to duck various sorts of active and passive surveillance.

Huckleberry Finn

Infinite Jest is almost entirely about this.

tends to ascribe cultural qualities to social media, which are real but not really inevitable.

They're not even real - no-one on the list of the most popular accounts sounds like what the bubble we're all in thinks of as 'Twitter', not even Elon Musk.

Part of the flattening of Twitter is that it turns thought into a series of pearls, but another part is the betrayal of the structure - the most annoying pile-ons come from a dossier of screen captures, taking the bad-looking thing out of its context into a new poisonously untrue one.

Lol I actually came here to mention Emma Lord's When You Get The Chance and the effect its precis has had on my cohort, but I can't resist an opportunity to propose burning Twitter to the ground.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54306966-when-you-get-the-chance

Nothing will get in the way of Millie Price’s dream to become a Broadway star. Not her lovable but super-introverted dad, who after raising Millie alone, doesn’t want to watch her leave home to pursue her dream. Not her pesky and ongoing drama club rival, Oliver, who is the very definition of Simmering Romantic Tension. And not the “Millie Moods,” the feelings of intense emotion that threaten to overwhelm, always at maddeningly inconvenient times. Millie needs an ally. And when a left-open browser brings Millie to her dad’s embarrassingly moody LiveJournal from 2003, Millie knows just what to do. She’s going to find her mom.

I find that I actually know roughly who the top 19 most popular people are.

Unsure about #20, Demi Lovato.

jeez I'd forgotten the Egan novel

I remember when Ashton Kutcher was the first person to get to 1,000,000 followers, I wonder what happened to - oh wow

Meet the cast of https://t.co/jN5FlgwQxb @chrisrock @SethMacFarlane @Janefonda @VitalikButerin myself and MilaK. Dropping tomorrow. Let’s turn short form content into long form content. You are the studio! pic.twitter.com/A8yBqYIi2v

— ashton kutcher (@aplusk) July 26, 2021

Translation: if not, I am about to. pic.twitter.com/sn8thoc3ul

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) August 12, 2021

"Part of the flattening of Twitter is that it turns thought into a series of pearls, but another part is the betrayal of the structure - the most annoying pile-ons come from a dossier of screen captures, taking the bad-looking thing out of its context into a new poisonously untrue one."

This is often not the case. In any case it's not as if taking things out of context doesn't happen in real-life arguments. And if it is happening you can read enough tweets that point to this.

Always think of 'flattening' as trying explain something in a tweet thread instead of, say, reading a book on the thing. This is also wrong.

This is obviously pre-Twitter, but lots of the dialogue in Tao Lin's Shoplifting from American Apparel takes place over Gmail chat, and it name-checks MySpace, YouTube, EBay, Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, blogs, etc.

sitting in a local coffeeshop re-reading the LRB bcz my life is exciting!

and i found a link to this thread (started be me) and felt it might be good to revive and update it with fiction that's "about" life online that came out since 17 aug 2021 (or before if not already mentioned)

the first line of yr post revives and updates Joni's "California" tbf

can we include all of Rowling's post Harry Potter books since they're about getting pwned online?

no

i mean maybe i don't know but i doubt they're insightful except insofaras they're symptomatic

oh god i can't imagine they're insightful

twitter-user @keewa did a handy line-by-line on the most recent "robert galbraith", whose plot featured flame-wars and pile-ons and fan-doms and socks and etc -- apparently it was less merely clumsily score-settling than everyone perhaps expected going in (most of this was clumsy scene-setting more than an active roman-de-clef shivving of foes) but it also didn't sound very good or thought through or well edited or whatever. v shitty ppl can be excellent novelists but this does not apply to her SITO

caveat: i tuned out maybe 80 pages into the very first HP -- she doesn't write well and she doesn't have an interesting conception of her primary topic = magic

(i think the line-by-line might be locked to non-followers tho)

i'm a follower, i might even have read it already lol who knows?

(roman-A-clef is i believe the more normal term)

felt gauche to correct you

droite pas gauche

Ted Chiang's novella "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" (not mentioned) is sort of literally about online life (by way of AI/virtual pets). Iirc it's pretty sad and devastating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Objects

I liked that pets one. Agree how sad it was.

caveat: i tuned out maybe 80 pages into the very first HP -- she doesn't write well and she doesn't have an interesting conception of her primary topic = magic

I mean Harry hasn't even gotten to Hogwarts at this point so tbf not much magic has happened (I'm currently reading it with my kid)

busted yes, i was porting in opinions from having to sit thru some of the films w/my niece

(they are also bad but i guess not necessarily JKR's direct fault)

It's not very good, but Calvin Kasulke's Several People Are Typing (2021) is constructed entirely of Slack messages.

Haven't read this but this is the blurb for The Novelist (2022):

In Jordan Castro's inventive, funny, and surprisingly tender first novel, we follow a young man over the course of a single morning as he tries and fails to write an autobiographical novel, finding himself instead drawn into the infinite spaces of Twitter, quotidian rituals, and his own mind.