![]() ![]() ![]() Tolentino’s essay The I in the Internet, the first chapter in Trick Mirror, is perhaps the most important single text on life as a user of social media, as it tracks the slow souring of the dream of total connectivity within her lifetime. They share a sense of its enormous dynamism and power, as well as its vertiginous capacity for harm. The 10 books I’ve chosen here trace the development of social media across the last decade, explore its effects in everyday life, and place it in its wider context. ![]() In Viral, I imagine a crew of half-credulous, half-cynical, mainly British ex-pats in Berlin in 2015, riding the first wave of social media marketing, and finding that it leads them into unexpected waters. ![]() Now there is no division: the user content is the marketing content, and “social-first” is a far more powerful tool for brand promotion than traditional advertising. Before that, the platforms tried to downplay the fact that they were advertising companies the marketing happened in the gaps between the user content, just an annoying sidebar. My new novel, Viral, plunges into the world of social media’s makers, at a decadent mid-stage in its short history: the moment in the mid-2010s when the possibilities of social as a vast advertising platform started to be harnessed in a new way. “In the destructive element immerse,” urged Joseph Conrad in 1900. It has touched all aspects of life: for many people, their most intimate conceptions of themselves, their relations to other people, their political commitments, and their sexuality – as well as their basic livelihoods – are now tangled up in the loose cluster of phenomena known as Web 2.0. H as anything ever caused a faster transformation in our practices of living than social media? Fifteen years ago, it barely existed today, it occupies a large portion of the waking consciousness of a few billion people. ![]()
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