Andrew Miller reviews: ‘How a Generation Shaped, Destroyed and Survived the Internet’

by Marie Le Conte

There are, broadly speaking, three generations of humans alive right now with distinct experiences of the internet. There are people – such as myself – of middle age and upwards, who reached adulthood without googling anything, sending an email, having a social media account or owning a mobile phone. At the opposite end of the spectrum are people in their mid-20s and younger, for whom the online world is as taken for granted as electric light. The author and journalist Marie Le Conte is of the generation between.

She was born in 1991, and reckons she probably went online for the first time towards the end of that decade. New technologies are usually adopted first by the young, and it seems Le Conte was no exception to this rule. She launched a blog when she was 12, and a website about rock music when she was 15. She now has over 90,000 followers on Twitter. ‘Mine has been a life lived online,’ she says in the introduction to her book, ‘and if you remove the life I have led on there, it leaves me with no life at all.’

This is in no way a complaint. Le Conte is clear that her time online has largely been tremendous fun, and she has many amusing stories to prove it. But her view of the internet now is similar to that of an early fan of a once unknown rock band that has become immensely famous. The fan finds themselves crowded into the back of some huge arena, thinking, ‘Who are all these awful people?’

Le Conte uses a mixture of interviews and personal reflections to chart the internet’s course from its initial arrangement as a landscape of small ‘villages’, each with its own rules, conventions and traditions, to today’s much more centralised arrangement, where much, if not most, online activity is filtered through just a handful of social media platforms. The villages have become cities, and just like city-living in the real world, this has advantages and disadvantages. In the physical world, humanity has learnt to cope with city life by allowing our fellow citizens to say, do, believe, wear, and consume what they please so long as they don’t bother us with it. Online, you may have noticed, it does not work like that: social media is full of people for whom being angry in public, very often about nothing at all, has become a hobby, if not a job.

Le Conte takes issue, and persuasively so, with the conventional wisdom that social media places us all into ‘echo chambers’, where our own views are reflected back at us. The actual difficulty, she suggests, is the opposite. By way of example, she describes a recent social media storm she accidentally set off. She posted what she thought was an amusing tweet about living within earshot of an opera singer. It was soon shared with another opera singer, and before long Le Conte found herself under attack by many opera singers who objected furiously to her tweet. For Le Conte it is a cause of much sorrow that the internet spaces we occupy these days make us feel tense because we never feel truly safe in them.