Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art

by Virginia Heffernan

Just as Susan Sontag did for photography and Marshall McLuhan did for television, Virginia Heffernan (called one of the “best living writers of English prose”) reveals the logic and aesthetics behind the Internet.

Since its inception, the Internet has morphed from merely an extension of traditional media into its own full-fledged civilization. It is among mankind’s great masterpieces—a massive work of art. As an idea, it rivals monotheism. We all inhabit this fascinating place. But its deep logic, its cultural potential, and its societal impact often elude us. In this deep and thoughtful book, Virginia Heffernan presents an original and far-reaching analysis of what the Internet is and does.

Life online, in the highly visual, social, portable, and global incarnation rewards certain virtues. The new medium favors speed, accuracy, wit, prolificacy, and versatility, and its form and functions are changing how we perceive, experience, and understand the world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Art, Internet, Philosophy, Science, Sociology

272 pages, Hardcover

First published August 4, 2015

Reviews

[Sara Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

From my Columbia Journalism Review article: http://www.cjr.org/tow_center/tech_cr...

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN’S TWITTER BIO once described her as “something like a critic.” Her reluctance to fully embrace the title is understandable, given that most of what passes as technology criticism today tends either towards gadget reviews or curmudgeons bemoaning the loss of what makes us human.

Somewhere along the line, critical writing about technology became equated with a reactionary disapproval of progress. How can one argue against this wonderful thing that is meant to make us fitter, happier, more productive? Yet, as Heffernan writes, “Every year another book with a title like The Shallows or The Dumbest Generation…condemns the Internet with no less righteous indignation than our Tory pamphleteer.” Our most widely recognized tech critics—Evgeny Morozov, Sherry Turkle, Nicholas Carr, and Jaron Lanier—declare the folly of thinking that technology is capable of solving all our problems, while their literary counterparts—Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith—worry that 140-character writing will erode their craft and moralize about the deterioration of culture.

Heffernan shares “the deep feeling that digitization has cost us something very profound.” But she also encourages us to relish new forms of media. Her passion for her subject pulls technology criticism out of a relentlessly pessimistic spiral.

Heffernan began her career as a critic tricking her editors into letting her write about culture by pitching technology stories—“technology had seemed to be the masculine form of the word culture.” And with her first book, Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art, she sets out to convince us that the internet is humanity’s greatest collective art project. In a market saturated with books about the business, politics, or science of the internet, Heffernan’s cultural approach is a welcome contribution.

The Internet as Art

Magic and Loss views the internet as a collective endeavor that has developed into a “masterpiece of human civilization” alongside “the pyramid, the aqueduct, the highway, the novel, the newspaper.” But, as Heffernan argues, it is not just impressive in magnitude, it is also a record of the world as we know it—a “grand emotional, sensory, and intellectual adventure.” As such, Heffernan deems it “a massive and collaborative work of realist art”—and as a work of art, it can be best understood using the tools of cultural criticism.

This is the aim of her book: to apply the interpretive tools that we have already developed for traditional art to “build a complete aesthetics—and poetics—of the Internet.” While I’m not sure she comes close to anything “complete,” she does offer an extensive first pass.

Heffernan excels at tying things together, bringing canon into conversation with cat videos.



Heffernan’s contributions are strongest when she theorizes like a media scholar. Take Instagram, for instance. Heffernan writes that “images have become units of speech, building blocks in a visual vocabulary that functions like a colonial patois, where old-school darkroom photography is the native tongue and digitization is the imperial language.” She is able to see beauty in even the most mundane parts of our online lives, connecting design and practice: “When you tag the heck out of an Instagram—laden it to groaning like a prayer wall at a Shinto shrine—you hasten and broaden its circulation by making it searchable.”

She highlights how Kindle’s limited internet connection enables focus, noting that Kindle “bestows on the contemporary reader the ultimate grace: it keeps the Internet at bay.” She discerns the literary qualities of Twitter: “Tweets are not diseased firings of glitchy minds,” Heffernan writes. “They’re epigrams, aphorisms, maxims, dictums, taglines, headlines, captions, slogans, and adages.” New media, she shows us, are not incongruous with high culture.

Heffernan excels at tying things together, bringing canon into conversation with cat videos. Her description of the visceral experience of virtual reality in the Oculus Rift draws on French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée. She rediscovers Walter Benjamin’s lost aura in Etsy handmades and in tears spilled over a cracked iPhone. But engaging with high culture doesn’t weigh the book down. Instead, her exploration is playful and her joy in writing palpable, as when she describes BlackBerries as “that off-black fidget absorber” from which “connectivity gluttons learned…the ecstasy of onanistic thumb-wrestling with text.” Simply by bringing her creative thinking to bear on a myriad of cultural artifacts—lonelygirl15, synesthetic perfume forums, Kanye’s hashtag rap, addictive mobile games, Ebaumsworld, prison blogs—Heffernan leaves no question that the internet is worthy of our attention and appreciation.

While the book puts forth plenty of evidence to show that the internet is art, at the end, I was left wanting to read more how artists incorporate new technology into their work, using it to play with narrative, image, and design—especially those fiction writers who have tackled the internet in recent work, such as Jonathan Franzen, Joshua Cohen, Dave Eggers, and Jennifer Egan. The internet, after all, is an essential part of contemporary art practice, with artists showcasing internet-inspired work at places like The New Museum, Eyebeam, and covered by Hyperallergic and Rhizome. Heffernan also misses an opportunity to address the physical stuff of internet technologies, despite the book’s fantastically tactile raised fiber-optic cover art. She focuses the iPhone’s invitation to take lots of high dynamic range (HDR) photographs, but she doesn’t mention the pleasure of consuming HDR images on the iPhone’s retina Gorilla Glass screens.



The Medium is the Internet?

It is easy to see works of art in the internet through Heffernan’s eyes. It’s less easy to understand precisely how the internet works as an art form in itself.

The internet has come to mean many things to many people. It has a technical meaning, as the protocol governing the format of data, enabling anything to talk to anything with an address. It has a physical meaning, as in undersea cables, bottlenecks, and geopolitical control points. It has a formal meaning, in features that describe what the internet adds to other media forms: connectivity, linkability, on-demand access. It has cultural capital in its penchant for all things viral. It has also become a sort of cultural shorthand: When “the internet” is the subject of a sentence, it usually means “people on the internet.” It’s even changing our language—“because internet.”

Heffernan never pins down precisely which definition or version of the internet she means to call art. Chapter by chapter, the book tackles traditional forms we know and recognize—design, image, text, music, video—that have been altered by the internet. Heffernan toggles seamlessly between mobile games like Angry Birds, devices like the BlackBerry, and social media, all under the umbrella of “the Internet.” This generous structure works for a weekly magazine column, but reads scattershot in the space of a book. By using this loose structure, she may mean to suggest that the internet acts as the meta-medium that underlies the design, text, images, video, and music she describes.

Yet, Heffernan does not limit her critique to technologies that are predicated on the internet. The iPod was a digital transformation that only relied on the internet to introduce the iTunes store, not to support the MP3 file format or the design of MP3 player itself. Spritz, a speed-reading technology, belongs to the domain of small screens and wearables, while the internet only provides the content to be read. Oculus Rift offers more immersive opportunities when connected, but the virtual reality tech itself isn’t inherently an internet object, it’s a visual one. So is it really the internet that we should understand as art? Or digitization? Or consumer technologies?

This is the danger of Heffernan putting the “Internet” with a capital “I” at the center of her work. The internet is now such old news that the AP style guide demoted it to common noun of lowercase status, though Heffernan contends that such treatment “lacks proper reverence,” and she remains a staunch defender of the capitalized form. In doing so, Heffernan implies a singular internet, rather than a more pluralistic understanding of multiple internets that acknowledges variation in access and experience worldwide. Heffernan perhaps gives too much weight to the unique properties and redemptive potential of the internet. Evgeny Morozov has criticized this unquestioning stance, taken by those seduced by the promise of the idea of the internet, calling it “internet centrism” (others have labeled it “internet exceptionalism”).

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph,” Sontag wrote. Heffernan’s work suggests that everything now exists to end up on the internet.

In the book’s promotional material, Heffernan’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, places her work in a critical lineage that includes Marshall McLuhan on television or Susan Sontag on photography. Heffernan’s project certainly shares more with the work of these media critics than with Morozov’s. Sontag defined photography and its relationship to art forms that came before it, and gave us language to address the aesthetic and ethical questions surrounding photographic practice. “In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe,” Sontag wrote. “They are a grammar, and even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.”

McLuhan offered us analysis of the formal characteristics of all variety of mass media—its features, its affordances, its effects, its limitations. For him, content mattered less than the means of delivery, and he offered frameworks—some inscrutable, such as “hot” and “cold” media—that helped readers draw distinctions between cinema and television in terms of scale, distribution, and consumption patterns.

But Sontag’s and McLuhan’s are big shoes to fill, and Heffernan only gets halfway there. “The Internet has a logic, a tempo, an idiom, a color scheme, a politics, and an emotional sensibility all its own,” Heffernan writes. But is that tempo allegro? Silicon Valley cerulean blue? Heffernan never precisely names those generalized, formal characteristics of the internet. It is difficult to see the internet as a cohesive medium on par with photography or television, with recognizable identifying features in its own right.

The internet, after all, is the dominant cultural medium of our time. “That most logical of aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book,” Sontag wrote. “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” Heffernan’s work suggests that everything now exists to end up on the internet.



Beyond Clickbait Criticism

That’s the thing about the internet. It it simplifies rather than complicates, polarizes rather than encouraging nuance. Contemporary tech criticism—writing about the internet, for the internet—suffers from oversimplification, clickbait headlines, and sensational narratives. But tech writing should critique, not criticize; it should make meaning out of things, not find fault in them. Or, as Heffernan says in an interview, it should “‘familiarize the unfamiliar’ and ‘de-familiarize the familiar.’”

Unlike many technology critics, Heffernan resists the reductive questions publications so often employ in their headlines, down to the title of her book. The internet is both magic and loss. Technology is both good and evil, makes us smart and stupid, connects and separates us. Heffernan wants us to explore the murky spaces in between.

She has experienced backlash for this position. In 2013, she published an article that started a fire: “Why I’m a Creationist”—playing off Bertrand Russell’s “Why I Am Not a Christian.” She claimed to be a Creationist on “aesthetic grounds,” suggesting that storytelling and narrative are more crucial to life than science. Heffernan may be too clever for the internet, where meaning is reduced to the length of a tweet. For those who can go beyond the headline, her work is illuminating, but to Twitter trolls and comment sharks, Heffernan’s rhetoric and allusion are just chum.

Contemporary tech criticism—writing about the internet, for the internet—suffers from oversimplification, clickbait headlines, and sensational narratives.

Of course, she’s not the only one. Plenty of journalists, bloggers, and academics are contributing to a discussion about technology. They are authors and activists, like Rebecca Solnit and Astra Taylor, or academics like Zeynep Tufeki and Kate Crawford, writing op-eds pointing out what really matters about the latest tech kerfuffle. Or they are journalists and bloggers, like Heffernan’s colleagues Clive Thompson, Jenna Wortham, Alexis Madrigal, and Rose Eveleth, covering the technology beat. But when I spoke with many of these writers for my forthcoming Tow Center research on technology criticism, they too were reluctant to be associated with “criticism” for its negative connotations and destructive tactics.

Beyond the premise of reading the internet as art, Magic and Loss reads more like a collection of ruminations than a cohesive argument. This may be what we get from tech criticism informed by the humanities—lots of interpretation and reading, but no normative directive for what ought to be instead. Heffernan’s is a practical criticism, one that doesn’t necessarily grapple with the capitalist ecosystem that supports technological change, a perspective Morozov laments is missing from more radical critiques of technology. But she never claims that a humanist lens is the only valid approach to the internet. “Evgeny is a very useful critic,” she told me in an interview. “He is extremely ideological, quite alarmist, but really useful and brilliant because he puts so much heavy 20th-century pressure on these seemingly fragile forms.” Heffernan puts forth a more relatable and useful account for those still struggling to understand the technology that has subsumed our culture and our lives.



Criticism for Living

When David Pogue and Walt Mossberg left their posts at The Times and The Wall Street Journal, respectively, Matt Buchanan wrote that the next great technology critic would not be a gadget reviewer. “The questions that consumers face, in other words, are less about what to buy than about how to live.” This is Heffernan’s strength: she plants her criticism firmly in subjective experience. We may or may not share her obsession with perfume forums or #freeskip Twitter campaigns, but we learn to read the internet for ourselves through her example. Heffernan gives us a vocabulary and a model for understanding our feelings, our concerns, our joys, and our fears about technology. Though Heffernan succeeds at demonstrating how one might read the internet as art, she does so mostly by example. Readers walk away understanding how Heffernan reads the internet, but we have to read between the lines to gather tools to carry on that critical work for ourselves.

When Heffernan started writing her column on online video for The Times in 2006, internet culture was a thing to be understood on its own. Streaming online video was only just becoming possible without cumbersome buffering. Memes were barely broaching the mainstream news cycle. BuzzFeed was just a baby. Today, your dad—and maybe even your grandfather—is on Facebook.

As we begin to take the internet for granted, it’s more important than ever to recognize the need for robust and diverse technology criticism. We grapple with which metrics we should use to judge Facebook’s integrity in serving us, as a social platform or as a journalistic entity. Wealthy Silicon Valley VCs with a grudge can ruin entire publications by throwing their weight behind lawsuits. Publishers tiptoe around criticizing tech companies because social platforms and newsfeeds control access to their audiences. We need to stop seeing technology criticism as destructive; rather, it gives us the opportunity to shape the future of technology in our everyday lives. Heffernan’s nuanced example in Magic and Loss expands the notion of what technology criticism can and should be.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Internet is entrenched. It's time to understand it – and not as a curiosity or an entry in the annals of technology or business but as an integral part of our humanity, as the latest and most powerful extension and expression of the project of being human.

When I was in my early twenties, I met a man who was a recent recipient of a degree in Philosophy. In my ignorance, I found this puzzling, and I asked him in all seriousness what the value was in a Philosophy degree; what did he intend to do with it? He patiently explained to me that Philosophy is the most important of studies, and while the majority of people could be satisfied with mindlessly doing things, there would always be a need for those who stand apart from the action, evaluating the import of that which is being done. In all the intervening years, I haven't done much to deepen my knowledge of Philosophy – I can no more explain Hegelian Dialectics than I can Hubbardian Dianetics – but that doesn't mean that I don't dip from time to time into the writings of those who have the ability to stand back from our modern world and evaluate the import of what's going on. Virginia Heffernan certainly has this ability, and with Magic and Loss, she employs her uniquely appropriate background – as a very early user of the pre-Internet, and as the recipient of both an undergrad degree in Philosophy and a PhD in English Literature, she has worked as a television critic at Slate and as an Internet columnist at The New York Times – to deconstruct (and celebrate) this revolutionary technology that the majority of us mindlessly use without ever standing back and evaluating its import; defining that which seems magic and that which is, inevitably, lost.

When I recently followed a suggestion and read The Shallows, I was left unconvinced by that author's Doomsday warnings about us all blindly marching off the cultural cliff of Internet use. It was supremely satisfying for me, therefore, when Heffernan called out that book (amongst others) by name, stating that:

Alarmist tracts that warn about how the Web endangers culture or coarsens civilization miss the point that the same was said in turn about theater, lyric poetry, the novel, film, and television.

The only idea I found compelling in The Shallows was the evidence from fMRI machines that showed the differences seen in the brain when reading a tablet vs reading a physical book (and the implications this had for deep study and the development of wisdom), and I was shocked to read Heffernan refer to this as pseudoscience; as “false empiricism in the service of ideology”. I'll need to chew on that further. Probably use the Internet to find the consensus on “neurobiology is pseudoscience”. My point is: this is the kind of Negative Nellying that Heffernan continually takes on in this book. People think that the limits of Twitter preclude deep thought? Every Confucianism can be stated in fewer than 140 characters, replies Heffernan. People think that the selfie has degraded and diluted the art of photography? Instagram, and Flickr before it, are powerful tools in the hands of an artist. Network television can't believe that their carefully – professionally – produced efforts are losing eyeballs to the trash on YouTube? There wouldn't be millions of views on “haul” and “fail” videos if that wasn't what people wanted to see. This is the democratisation of art; the Internet is a place where we can all express ourselves. And because this is where I primarily express myself, I'll include the Negative Nellying about the future of reading itself:

Americans read with highlighters. We read for “information”, as though for a future comprehension test. We underline, copy quotations, pull excerpts, produce decks, compose reviews. And if the World Wide Web has shown us anything at all, they also comment like crazy – on literary blogs, on Facebook, and on Goodreads as well as in seamier venues.

The National Endowment for the Arts regards this type of “participatory reading” as “impure”; we who mark quotes and write reviews aren't actually reading because the NEA says so. But we all know better – it doesn't take a Philosopher to notice that even those who would never pick up a book are actually reading constantly on their screens and devices.

To be more general about Magic and Loss: Heffernan divides her message into the five broad categories for which we use the Internet – Design, Text, Images, Video, and Music – and along the way, she enthuses about those advancements that most excite her personally: the Kindle; iPod; “beautiful” game apps like Hundreds; the perfection of VR with Oculus Rift; this is the magic of the title. Heffernan also points out the downsides of moving our lives over to the digital world: the poor design of the Internet in general (because of the rampant dyslexia of early programmers, apparently); the constant tracking of and selling to the users of the Internet; paywalls that divide us into classes; the loss of depth to the music that is compressed into MP3s; no longer experiencing the singular intimacy of listening to the breathing of the person on the other end of a twirly-corded landline; these are the losses; a decent trade-off to me. My only complaint would be that Heffernan seems to be writing broadly on culture – to me there's only a casual relationship between Kindles and iPods and the Internet – but I did find it all interesting, if not quite what the title promised. In the final section of the book, Heffernen goes off-topic completely, going into more depth about her early love of computer programming, her transformation from atheist Philosophy student to agnostic English grad student to converted Jewish wife, mother and columnist to her recently outing herself as a Creationist: and I loved the addition of all this personal information. Again, this might not be quite what was promised by the promotional blurb, but I was interested in all of it.

The Internet is the great masterpiece of human civilization. As an artifact it challenges the pyramid, the aqueduct, the highway, the novel, the newspaper, the nation-state, the Magna Carta, Easter Island, Stonehenge, agriculture, the feature film, the automobile, the telephone, the telegraph, the television, the Chanel suit, the airplane, the pencil, the book, the printing press, the radio, the realist painting, the abstract painting, the Pill, the washing machine, the skyscraper, the elevator, and cooked meat. As an idea it rivals monotheism.

If there's one thing I know for sure, it's that the erudition and enthusiasm of Virginia Heffernan explicates and justifies all those Philosophy degrees; I'm certainly delighted that she's able to step back and evaluate this Internet thing that we all currently take for granted; more delighted that I have found her.

[Andrea Stoeckel · Rating 1 out of 5]

[I received this book free from the publisher through NetGalley. I thank them for their generousity. In exchange, I was simply asked to write an honest review, and post it. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising]

"That is this book’s central contention : that the Internet is a massive and collaborative work of realist art."

This is a non-fiction look at the internet, from bulletin board days through today and beyond into what they web proposes to be in the not far distant future. The problem is that the book isn't really what it claims. The farther you get into this very detailed tome, the more frustrated you might get if you, like the author has been part of the growth of the web as I have ( all my original work as well as my actual required ordination papers are on floppy disks that can no longer be accessed on today's laptop) then this book and its detailed descriptions and reviews of the major programs from Chrome to iCloud and beyond begins to be very redundant. With that as its presence, this is a book that has its uses, but is not a book about art. It is more like six months of "the best of CNET", and that is sad because it started out so well, and ended up so.....nothing. I would not recommend this book.

[Jason Pettus · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

So for what it's worth, I tried very earnestly to be a fan of Virginia Heffernan's Magic and Loss, a new collection of academic essays concerning "what the internet really means." I was attracted to it when first coming across it because her main conceit is that the internet is the largest act of performance art in human history; not the individual parts that make up the internet, which ultimately are nothing special (shooting a video for YouTube is fundamentally the same process as shooting a video for VHS; writing an essay for a blog is fundamentally the same process as writing an essay for a paper magazine), but rather the way these trillion pieces of content come together, the way they influence each other, the way that humans' lives have fundamentally changed through the act of being exposed to these trillion pieces of content all at once.

But books of academic essays are a hit-and-miss proposition for non-academes like me; and for every great, accessible academic writer like Malcolm Gladwell you come across, there seems to be an equal amount of books like this one, essentially 300 pages of high-falutin' masturbation, ten-dollar words, Emily Dickinson references, and endless goddamn callbacks to other academic talks at SXSW and TED. It made me grow weary of this book rather quickly, which will be the reaction of most non-academes to this as well; although if you are a full-time resident of the ivory tower, by all means take a chance on it, because doubtless you'll have a better experience than me.

Out of 10: 6.5, or 8.5 for full-time academes

[Mindy McAdams · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have a love-hate relationship with this kind of nonfiction book, in which someone with education and writing ability but no special expertise attempts to spin an artful commentary about a broad phenomenon or condition of society. I talk myself out of ever reading (or even starting) many such books because I know the process of reading will be filled with many frustrations and few rewards. Perhaps I've created a self-fulfilling prophecy, because that describes my experience with this fairly accurately.

1. Design. I almost quit right here. This is the weakest chapter in the book — it says nothing new, and Heffernan really does not seem to know anything about design.

2. Text. By far the longest chapter in the book, and I enjoyed it for about 20 pages, and then felt like it would never end (for a few pages), and then got interested again when Heffernan started to describe the experience of using a Kindle. I enjoyed that part a lot because it made me think about ways I enjoy reading on a Kindle, and why (how it's different from my laptop or my phone), and that was something I had not thought much about before. At this point, I began to feel much more charitable toward the book.

3. Images. Here she discusses Flickr (aw, nostalgia) and Instagram, and I liked this short chapter very much. The parts about parents becoming producers, editing their children's lives, is quite good (although the home-video era probably had some of the same aspects).

4. Video. This chapter is largely about YouTube (and interesting for that) and VR (the 360-degrees kind). Some bits of the VR section were thought provoking, but mostly not. Binging too (pp. 161–63).

5. Music. I did not expect much at all from this chapter, and maybe that helped. Also, I don't know much about music, and I rarely read about it. Heffernan talks a lot about loss in this chapter, and it raises a number of ideas around the way we hear music and consume it and so on, and the progression from the iPod to the iPhone. One of the best bits was her nostalgic take on the telephone — the way teens used to use corded phones in their parents' houses, and the intimacy of that, and how that intimacy is gone with the phones we use now.

Heffernan does come back to the themes of "magic" and "loss" multiple times, but she's no great word artist, and her ideas, while not actually flotsam (in that they are not debris), do float randomly like the remains of a broken ship. This is no Convergence Culture or The Second Self, and Heffernan is no Henry Jenkins or Sherry Turkle.

6. Even If You Don't Believe in It. Ugh. Heffernan gets way too autobiographical here, and I absolutely could not even begin to care. She begins talking about heaven, "the Cloud" (you know, cloud computing, but mainly just as storage), and religious belief, but she quickly decides to switch over to her life story as it involved religion (hardly any) and philosophy (briefly in her university years) and Wittgenstein and Twitter and the physicist Frank Wilczek. She's trying to make it a big finish with Magic and Loss and God and Immortality — but trust me, you don't need this.

Overall I'd say you can skip reading this, unless you like to buzz through this kind of book, which obviously I do not.

[C. Hollis Crossman · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the preface to Magic and Loss, Virginia Heffernan drops the tantalizing metaphor of the Internet as one vast MMORPG. She doesn't spend a lot of time dissecting it, but she uses the comparison more than once, suggesting that she's setting the stage for at least part of the discussion in the chapters to come.

Then she resolutely fails to make good on that promise. Instead, she shifts to speaking of the Internet as the world's most ambitious work of collective realist art. This is meant to be the controlling metaphor of the book, where what we gain from seeing the world through WWW eyes is cast as "magic" and what is inferior to past experience is called "loss." But Heffernan doesn't apply herself very assiduously to this framework, either.

Instead, we follow her on a seemingly randomly-plotted jaunt through her reflections on various aspects comprising the Internet—text, video, sound, etc. Some of her observations are interesting (particularly in the chapter on music, where she notes that what we hear in our iPod earbuds is actually just an approximation of music), some are boring (she manages to make something as cool and interesting as Oculus Rift sound pedestrian and uninventive), and some just seem to lead not much of anywhere.

Which seems to be the ultimate destination of the book. In the final chapter we get a swirly semi-autobiography of Heffernan's graduate endeavors (with a fair amount of name-dropping to boot), which ends with her embracing soft agnosticism towards religion and technology alike, making one last hurried reference to the book's "The Internet as Art" subtitle which utterly fails to bring together everything we've just read.

Add to this failed sense of direction or purpose Heffernan's maddeningly familiar, posturing, Ivy League in-crowd prose. It's as if every privileged higher-educated New England writer thinks they're a combination of John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Margaret Atwood. Heffernan is not, and her thesaurus-based tactics come off stilted and somewhat unbelievable. I came hoping for cultural criticism of the Internet; I left with nothing but rambling too-long Tweets posing as cultural criticism of the Internet rolling around in my noggin.

[David Sasaki · Rating 2 out of 5]

I number of people I respect recommended this book, and I was immediately enchanted by the premise of the Internet as performance art space where we creatively act out our neuroses and insecurities, but there was something about Hefferman's pretentious, rambling style of writing that prevented me from sticking with it. I gave up after the third chapter.

[Aliesha · Rating 1 out of 5]

Awful. Pedantic and at the same time, lightweight.

[Anny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have received a copy of this book in an exchange for an honest review.

Since I spend an unspeakable amount of my life on the internet, I was really excited, because it sort of combined my favourite things to do. Internet, art...and it was a book! The only thing that was missing was food. Maybe next time, Virginia Heffernan!

The aspect of the book that I probably liked the most was the language that flowed nicely and gave the text an artistic quality that I really enjoyed. Even though I’ve had a few issues later on (that I’m going to mention), the language just kept me focused on my reading.
As a daily, overly-active internet user, Magic and Loss really spoke to me on a major level. I got a tingle of excitement every time I understood a pop culture reference, even when it was just a video I have seen or a medium I have used. I liked the division into chapters according to the elements of the internet and I think all the topics were more or less relatable to an average or above average internet user. To be frank, I cannot imagine my Nan reacting to this book in the same way! She can’t tell the difference between Facebook and Skype and is happy when her e-mails send. But I would definitely recommend this book to anyone, who knows what a letsplay is and whose abbreviation skills are beyond btw and lol.
While the topics themselves felt really familiar, I still had a few issues. I am not sure if it is just the fault of a slightly misleading blurb or if it was the intention of the author, but I have found a lot of strays from the initial topic to the point when I was not sure which chapter I was on. And while I can still understand the subject of ebooks versus physical copies issue or the introduction of Oculus Rift, because even when not directly, they still relate to the internet in a way, I was confused when the author brought up what it was like calling up a landline in the olden days of no mobile phones. And again, I could understand how the topic emerged, but my OCD simply suffered, because it did not fit into the category I was reading about. Sometimes, it slightly reminded me of a lecturer that just wanders off during a lecture and whom it takes a few coughs of their students to get back to the original topic, however interesting their sidetrack was.

However, as I have already mentioned before, the language and general themes make the book very enjoyable and readable, it was very clear that Virginia Heffernan tried to address as many issues as possible. It has worked (in a way) for me, let’s see if it works for others as well!

Read the review on my blog

[Brianna Snyder · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been a forever-fan of Virginia Heffernan and so when I heard her book was coming out, I was so so excited.

"Magic and Loss" is part memoir, part tech analysis and big-part Web-culture crit. Heffernan studies the Internet as though it were a novel or a poem. Reading "Magic and Loss" is like seeing all the familiar elements of the Web with a new brain or from a higher plane. Or like with a better soul. All the things I'm so used to about the Internet -- YouTube, comment sections, MP3s -- are cast in new, prettier light. Heffernan shows you the big ugly hard-to-understand Internet intimately, with kindness, with forgiveness.

Which isn't to say Heffernan isn't at times skeptical. She is, but not about those parts of the Web that dominate our conversations about what the Internet means to Society. There's no shrieking about attention spans or endangered books and there's no hand-wringing about how much "real human interaction" we're getting or not getting. Heffernan is calm, anti-hysterical and critical of short-sighted social science.

And she's funny, she's so funny. Living on the Web as Virginia Heffernan must be literal magic. She sees poetry and grace in almost everything. But making yourself so vulnerable to something as complex and wonderful and terrifying as the Internet and technology means there's so much at stake, too. When Heffernan is hurt by the magical, freaky Web, it hurts me, too.

There's really just nothing else in the world like this book. If you want to borrow my copy, just let me know.

[Dav · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't even make it through the preface. It was entirely too lacking in gravitas for something that was overtly asserting itself as having gravitas. It claims to "build a complete aesthetics -- and poetics -- of the Internet" and compares itself to Susan Sontag on photography or McLuhan on media.

I wasn't willing to put in any more time with such a high risk of disappointment. Instead, I'll employ the appropriately post-Internet magic of cutting my losses and just reading the reviews on Goodreads, probably equating to 10 hours of my life that could be put to better use.

[Ian · Rating 1 out of 5]

Started out slightly interesting but morphed into a rambling mess. The last half dived into a pretentious black hole to the point where I began to dislike the author. No conclusions, no grand point, no real substance.

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I prefer this take on the internet over the doom and gloom of books like the shallows and addicted. I believe in the magic and the loss. But the book fell short of real analysis. It's just a lot of wonderfully good writing and less thinking about what this means for the culture. I enjoyed it though.

[Bes · Rating 1 out of 5]

I would not recommend this to anyone. This book is not about the Internet at all: Heffernan has no cohesive thesis, spends most of her time writing extremely decorous descriptions of apps she's been addicted to, what's on her Kindle, her love for the iTunes Visualizer and her iPod, a section on the telephone, and concludes the last 40 pages about her personal religious struggles, collegiate history, and beginning work experience. This book infuriated me for claiming to be about the Internet and being neither a history nor an examination, just one particular woman's preferences with technology and devices and what she likes and dislikes. Heffernan rarely ever cites her quotes and litters people's names heavily without saying when or where or even what the person's thought was or came from. This book would have been better written and billed as a personal memoir rather than an aid to people interested in Internet and Art.

And for someone who claims to have been on the Internet for many decades, and is obsessed with YouTube and Twitter, it is amazing that Heffernan wrote as if her observations were both astutely revelatory and also timeless: this book was published in 2016 and yet is incredibly dated and obsolete already, and not in a way that could be fun to read for historical purposes, because, again, this is a personal account that has zero cohesion between sections or even the content to the title. One star for all of the names and anecdotes Heffernan spits out, so that an interested reader can go find better and more reputable reading on the subjects elsewhere.

I read an advanced uncorrected proof, so hopefully the book had a serious overhaul before it was officially printed, as well as hopefully included a bibliography. She talks about having been a fact checker in her early 20s for the New Yorker, and yet decades later Heffernan writes like an eighth grader required to mention some of what has been taught in class, but without really having a good idea of what to quote; just doing it for the sake of it. Somebody should ask Heffernan to cite her sources and consider why half of them are being included at all.

[Adam Mann · Rating 2 out of 5]

A disorganized book that doesn't live up to what it promises. In the preface, Heffernan states that the book's thesis is that "the Internet is a massive and collaborative work of realist art". But then it's almost as if she forgets this, as the book rarely addresses this contention. And upon reaching the last chapter (which meanders bafflingly away from the themes of the rest of the book and into the writer's personal life, to the point where I was writing "who cares?" in the margins), I didn't come away with the sense that't she'd try to answer the question at all.

Each chapter is filled with loose reflections on a theme -- Design, Text, Video, and Music. The problem is that the sub-sections in each chapter don't flow. They read more like disconnected blog posts that were thrown together. I had high hopes for this book, after reading in the preface, "I want...to show how readers might use the Web and not be overwhelmed by it." But again, Heffernan doesn't fulfill this promise or even do much in the way of trying.

[Olivia Ambrose · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not like this book. Which is a shame. Based on the summary and the concept, this book sounded fascinating to me, as someone who spends a great deal of time on the internet. But this was not the book I was looking for.

I didn't like Heffernan's writing style. First, it seemed to be condescending in parts, which nobody likes being talked down to. Also, the "idea" of this book was the 'internet as art.' A framework that was briefly explored in the very beginning and then abandoned until the very last paragraph, as if trying to shove a capstone on the end. On a whole the book is disjointed and seem like a series of very short essays about recent technology. There isn't a whole lot of talk about the 'magic' and 'loss' either.

This is a non-fiction book by someone who is obviously passionate, but also obviously isn't an expert in this field. And it shows. Definitely not a book I would recommend.

[kat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well this was... a bemusing read.

It begins with the stated intent of engaging with, and critiquing, the internet as a vast, collaborative work of realist art -- so far, so good. It sets off along that path with reasonable confidence, and some interesting things to say (including the main thesis, that "[The internet's] transformation of everyday life includes moments of magic and an inevitable experience of profound loss.").

This is quite the undertaking, and careens all over the map: forums, Twitter, Instagram, the iPod, VR, email, analog telephones, transhumanism, missionaries, philosophical academia, and so on... eventually winding up in some kind of incomprehensible morass of spirituality/religion.

The overall structure, enigmatic to begin with, fell apart quickly, and I struggled to find connective tissue or a narrative between the sections. The entire work veered rapidly into a sort of memoir of the author's own relationship with technology, littered with winking allusions to (and occasionally scathing attacks on) philosophical schools, eminences and lines of inquiry for which I have no context whatsoever. The whole thing might make more sense to a classically-educated academic?

Her arguments have a great deal of poetry to them, but I was often left at a loss (hah!) for what exactly she was asserting, as she tended to gesture in the general direction of a thought without really completing it or telling me what she meant by it. Lots of extremely bad takes which lost me entirely, like -- stating that it's likely user interfaces evolved from text to graphics because most programmers are/were dyslexic? That the move to the mobile and app-mediated web has "striking" parallels to "white flight" out of Detroit? That something deep in our biology lets us know that MP3-encoded music isn't "really" music, but is merely a representation of music? I mean.... what?

The last few chapters seemed to desperately want to say something about religion (or, as she would have it, theism) but again, her unwillingness to talk directly about her subject left me trying to piece together the puzzle of what she actually believes or even what she wants to express about those beliefs. Apparently she wrote a web article in which she declared herself a Creationist, but she meant it sort of ironically, and was shocked that she drew fire for it?

Everything in this book happens at two or three levels of remove, and I can't say I really relate to her rhapsodic nostalgia about certain cultural artifacts, nor to the way she seemed to consider being a technophile shameful (in college, she swore off computers, but then got a Compuserve email address, a fact which she kept hidden?). She takes this odd tone of defensively confiding that actually, the internet is culture -- possibly an effect of having spent much of her career writing about television, but somewhat alien to those of us who prefer a less tormented and tumultuous stance toward the digital world.

For all that, I quite like some of the individual pieces, and some of the ideas are quite interesting. Her defense of reading was quite good (spoiler: reading the internet is reading, and there's no particular reason we should mourn the death of the novel). She says:

In fact the signature pastime of the American consumer is now the mental act of processing digital, symbolic data: watching videos, graphics, maps, and images; listening to music and sound cues; and above all reading. ... With media, books, texts, and emails on mobile devices people are never not reading. We read while we’re socializing, working, shopping, relaxing, walking, commuting, urinating. From a nation that couldn’t stop eating, we’ve become a nation that can’t stop reading. As day follows night, our current form of overconsuming might be overreading. Hyperlexia. Reading texts while driving. Reading Facebook instead of sleeping. Buying multiple copies of books from Amazon, in print and digital form, as if to treat panic about future word famine, an imagined dystopia without text to read.

I also enjoyed her take on Instagram as an evolution and redemption of photography:

"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. ... Instagram, if you use it right, will stealthily persuade you that other humans, and nature, and food, and three-dimensional objects more generally are worth observing for the sheer joy of it. This little app has delivered a gorgeous reminder, one well worth at least $1 billion: Life is beautiful, and it goes by fast."

And the commentary that storytellers are now consumers was an interesting one:

The great-man producers of our own time, Katzman explained, were no longer the raconteurs of stage and screen, permitting viewers the fantasy that they were John Wayne or Cate Blanchett. Rather the new great-man producers were creating platforms that would permit others the fantasy of auteurism. ... If you owned YouTube, the storytellers were the audience, the consumers. 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.

Finally, the whole section on VR is worth a read, although again, I'm not honestly sure what the takeaways are.

If nausea is the body’s dysphoric response to the uncanny, presence is the euphoric one. ... Virtual reality sickness, la nausée, can be seen as the body’s radical disbelief in this illusion. It surfaces to remind you, in horror, of your subjectivity and to force you to reclaim your sensory autonomy.

[Gytis Dovydaitis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Poor and superficial, especially when it presents itself as being on par with Susan Sontag or Marshall McLuhan. Most of the arguments are just some personal stories of the author. I was hoping to find something academically useful, found only one thing - a fact that I should never read any of Heffernan's books again.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this book. While I find some of the individual facts interesting about the early foundations of different formats on the web, the narrative jumps around abruptly and frequently. The momentum of the book also gets cut off with an unexpected, unsatisfying memoirist ending.

[Tori Heroux · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book a lot. It's made for someone like me, [over]educated, with an appreciation for pop culture and struggling with questions (especially as a thinker/reader/writer) about how the internet has had a foundational impact on who I am, at 27.
I felt a little smug reading it, as a millennial with strong opinions who is tired of the catastrophizing tone of her elders as they recount all the ways our generation IN PARTICULAR is RUINED.
...but I also keenly felt the 'loss' part of the text, not just the 'magic.' What have I lost in a world where we spend 80% of our time in the Matrix, more or less? What connection to my body and the physical world am I missing out on?
I was a bit disappointed with how Heffernan categorizes that loss, though. The layers of a musical performance, or whispered conversations on a family phone line with a friend? Meh. Those feel like low stakes compared to what I imagine I've lost. She's pretty skeptical we lost anything out with ebooks. (I'm fairly agnostic on that point, tbh, but I still prefer physical books, and GASP I go to the library and don't buy most of the books I read).
She does get to this point in an extremely cursory way in the book's final page:
"The Internet suggests inmmortality--comes just shy of promising it--with its magic. With its readability and persistence of data. With its suggestion of universal connectedness. With its disembodied images and sounds. And then, just as suddenly, it stirs grief: the deep feeling that digitization has cost us something very profound. That connectedness is illusory, that we're all more alone than ever. That our shortcomings and our suffering are all the more painful because they're built in the mirror of a fathomless and godlike medium that doesn't suffer, that knows everything, that shows us no mercy or compassion. In those moments death shows through in the regular gaps in Internet service, and it's more harrowing than ever."
And that's all I get of significance on loss in 242 pages.. So yeah, that portion of the text felt like a lost opportunity, and though I was enchanted all the way through with the prose and the descriptive prowess of the author, I expected more. I also, sad to say, was not a fan of the heavily autobiographical and philosophical final chapter, which seemed to take about 30 pages to get back to the internet in any real way.

[Rick Harrington · Rating 5 out of 5]

I entered this book self-consciously wearing that habitual anger I now continuously try to transcend, mostly failing. The author herself did this to me by that point in her preface where she supplies jacket-copy which would be faithfully paraphrased by the Amazon come-on which reeled me in. As though it were some critic's take: "Just as Susan Sontag did for photography and Marshall McLuhan did for television, Virginia Heffernan (called one of the “best living writers of English prose”) reveals the logic and aesthetics behind the Internet." Dogfooding, right? No, I don't think that's the right term. Press-release confused as news. I knew that I would be duped, that I had been had.

Except for on the Internet, you're not allowed to suggest greatness for yourself, and I already knew there would be no theory here. I wanted a means by which to comprehend the Internet, that same thing McLuhan tantalizingly seemed to supply to media before it would seeming soon engulf us. I'd never heard of Heffernan, and easily bought the Kindle version because Amazon had credited me with some remainder from lawyer-enriching suits against price-fixing Apple. Something like that. I was willing to be had. Evidently. I own an iPhone. Kindle as an app, twice removed from thingness, not yet the cloud-reader.

Heffernan's version of history collapses so thoroughly into the NOW, that only a few years hence if there are any readers left of her, they will be required to parse her references in the same way that Rosetta Stone codexes are decoded, as though a random find of a fragment could allow a more-clear gaze into the lossy past if one just gazes hard enough. But just now, I get all her references, resenting her as I do for chest-pounding academy-baiting journalistic almost Blink-grade hubris. What's his name. You know. Gladwell. Phew!

It angers me too that she does actually remember those matters in recent history already gone to me. For me. Gone. Details etched for her in more youthful memory, trained to recall references as she has been, and I still won't forgive myself for not knowing who she is, this Virginia, namesake of my own for-the-unreconstructed-State-named mother, whose own being is reduced to a present which must be the inverse of that state of consciousness achieved by drowning in my youth. When the entirety of my life to that point was simultaneously there. Soon Mom will not remember my name. I cannot care less.

Eventually she calls the artifice of rose (you thought it a natural flower?) by its name - Kurtzweil demented - and wins me back and calms my anger, although it will be hard to forgive her abiding adulation of that which is destroying us, embrace of Nobodaddy, Destroyer of Worlds, it was not the atom - as she transmutes those to digital bits instead - which would release the horrible power of mankind's collapse of irony into Singularity with engendered God.

I want theory, dammit. My heart was already here when history longed for it. Nor cloud nor other metaphor will seduce me onto profane eternity. Art in earnest is not art, though Metaphor's figure constrains us to think so. Idealist Platonic reduction, as though the Internet, like the painting, is not the thing itself, representing nothing other.

Toward close of virtual book (for me. I hear there is a real one) she does reveal that there is a mathematics of life too, and that it has won the Nobel prize for its author (can you tell that I also would tantalize you to read this book, shill for someone I wouldn't dare actually to know).

Because I have not mind to remember anything, nor ever have had, and therefore feared dead-ending among wrong references followed; in something like the philosophy of language say, if there is such a thing, I've mostly done amateur sleuthing into Chinese literary figures, figuring that as a natural language there is no end to it, as there might be to endless particulate physics, say, or certainly critical literary study which can't stop global warming anyhow.

If one wants to exit idealist philosophy, one has to enter an entirely different world, where Metaphor is not the main conceit. Chinese will soon overtake English on the Internet. There there never was any concept of representational art, or ideas expressed, which is something that happens when you press a dog's bladder, or post a fart, but not in commune with the uncarved blockhead.

By the time which spans my brief life that keyboarding Chinese was reduced by power of so-called artificial intelligence (machine prediction, more properly) from acreage of indexed type, through analytical encoding, to pin yin sound-reversal, the power of digital to destroy the motor-memory embodied written word was already complete. Whole textual histories dissolve into the alzheimer's order from which I cannot retrieve a single remembered so-called photograph from the cloud into which I dutifully dump them. I suppose that it must be enough to know that I could if I were to really want to. Soon enough not.

Anyhow, nevermind theory. The Internet simply and totally means that the self is already gone and that it was our clawing for individual identity which caused the melt-down. College presidents now are first qualified as millionaires or named celebrities or ex-governing leaders, in some inverse proportion to the power of their school's name (But the University of Calfornia??!!! Really????). This is institutional isomorphism, aping Jobs and Gates, with students as widgets (scary nasty dangerous cut-throat widgets if you follow Heffernan to Harvard). Ditto identity. I won't wear blue-jeans ever. See? Journalists stand in as serious thinkers, sanctioned to make fun of scholarship in almost the same way as what's-his-name - Governor of Florida after Jeb - did or does or has. Authenticity is my enemy too, see, I am one with the masses. Of?

Damn if this Virginia isn't a hell of a lot more genius than you or me. She nails the titans of industry, men all, to the wall or to the crossroads of history. I'd like her to nail me too. But apart from being a brilliant writer, she's wrong on nearly every single point. Well, except for Creationism. She got that right. And discovered that irony is lost on the Internet along the way. Tant pis, dommage and a Deus. Vaya con Dios.

Yes, Virginia, there is a clause. It laughs, is fat, is witless. A safety clause. An exit clause. I watched pirated YouTube video of Eddie Van Halen at the Hollywood Bowl mid-reading and wished I could have been there. He is his guitar his guitar is him. I watched through the length of it mostly to preserve my suspense against the moment when copyright-security would shutter the unlicensed camera. Better than to be there. Better story. Close up and real. Ending more true-to-life.

Internet is not art so much as it is the representation of art now that art is dead and gone. This, in brief, the thesis of the book. Burn incense, bow, and keep that departed soul alive. It takes care not prayer to keep the heart alive. The Internet sucks all my living up to a sky Goddess wearing Prada is all I know for sure. I am left with nothing. And yet I cannot turn away.

[KJ Grow · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love listening to Virginia Heffernan on Slate's Trumpcast. Her commentary is always incisive and elegantly poetic - she clearly has a sharp mind and is a lover of words. This rapturous review of all things digital was somewhat less convincing to me, someone who is still part-Luddite and lover of all things analog, but she writes with such intellectual rigor and a genuine sense of awe that I couldn't help but enjoy it. She's at her best when writing about Twitter, Instagram, and virtual reality (she even made me want to try the Oculus Rift), but I found her deference to Amazon and view of the publishing industry to be shortsighted. The final chapter on her coming of age as a literary critic seemed a bit throwaway to me.

[Patty · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Over the past two decades screens have proliferated, filling our purses, pockets, and bedside tables. The living room is no longer configured around a single blazing digital fireplace, the television; instead it flashes with decentralized brushfires: ereaders, tablets, laptops, desktops, smartphones, televisions, refrigerator screens. As for the radios and bookshelves that were supposed to vanish with the digitalization of the American home, they’ve stubbornly remained.”

“We shouldn't confuse grief over the passing of our favorite technology with resentment because some digital alchemy failed to preserve analog experiences. Whether or not we admit it, the internet and its artifacts are not just like their cultural precedents. They're not even a rough translation -- or a strong misreading -- of those precedents.”

I really struggled with this book. Heffernan clearly knows her subject. She has been on the Internet since high school. (She is also young. I didn’t even know what computers were when I was in high school). She has been writing about the Internet for many years and her knowledge comes through. She is also very smart, smart enough that she writes easily about all areas of the world wide web. For brief periods of time, I was able to understand some of what Heffernan was trying to say about the past, present and future of our digital world.

Then, I would finish a chapter, try to review in my mind what I had learned, and I came up with nothing. This is not Heffernan’s fault. I just couldn’t always follow the author on the path she was taking. The Internet is a big place and I can’t always follow the links on it. I shouldn’t be surprised that when a critic takes on the whole Internet and tries to explain to me why it is art, that I would get lost. This is not my native land. I am an immigrant to a new solar system. I will never be comfortable in this culture.

I am not sorry that I read these essays – I am just disappointed that I don’t have enough knowledge to go where Heffernan was leading. I believe that this book would work for lots of people. Heffernan is a good writer who is well read and uses appropriate and interesting cultural references in these pages. I didn’t think a book about computers would necessarily quote Henry James, Dante and Wittenstein. Someone with a better understanding of pop culture and the evolution of the Internet would probably enjoy this book more than I did.

[Dan Weiskopf]

[Crossposted here from https://wordsandobjects.net/2017/06/1...]

A Halo of Pixels

Art and the Internet are hardly strangers. In the last decade-plus we’ve already cycled through net art, new media art, post-Internet art, and frantically onward, with each new movement and manifesto trying to formulate aesthetic principles and create works that respond to the dominance of networked computing over modern life.

Even when released onto the web, though, these have mostly been creations of the artworld. In Magic and Loss, Virginia Heffernan hopes to reorient the discussion by construing our everyday use of the Internet as a kind of art-making. “The Internet,” she proposes, “is a massive and collaborative work of realist art,” an idea she tentatively fleshes out by analogy with participatory games such as MMORPGs. As a vehicle for its own distinctive forms of aesthetic experience, it constitutes “the great masterpiece of human civilization.”

Heffernan writes as an unabashed enthusiast, suffused with affection for the minute choices that shape digital design. Perhaps the best precedent for her project is Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. Barthes wrote about the particulars of daily life—adverts, wrestling, plastic, steak and chips—in order to show how they are governed by the hidden logic of signs. Heffernan seems to be following this model, with chapters dedicated to design, images, text, video, and music. Photostreams, blogs, podcasts, tweets: these are our vehicles of everyday expression, pressed into service for everything from Presidential policy statements to our most intimate exchanges.

As worthwhile as this sounds, Magic and Loss by and large fails to make good on its ambitious promises. It frequently resembles a hodge-podge of columns or observations loosely strung together, rarely cohering into an overarching argument or narrative. (Or, to recall a dead analog metaphor, it skips around like a needle on a scratched record.) Even the book’s main target is elusive. Heffernan uses “the Internet” to refer not to the physical infrastructure of cables, routers, and servers, nor to the network structure defined by the protocol stacks that these systems use to communicate. Instead, it serves as a metonym for all of the ways that humans interact with the devices that are connected to this underlying network. This can mean the web in general, particular sites like YouTube, social media platforms like Twitter or Mastodon, iPhone apps and games, or devices like the Kindle and Oculus Rift that may not even be inherently networked, but are all part of the shimmering technological surroundings of our lives.

The problem for Heffernan is that in terms of audience, content, interface, governing norms, subjective experience, and affective tone, these have little in common. There is no “Internet aesthetic” that binds them together. Nor can they all be subsumed under her briefly sketched ludic analogy. True, social media involves the construction of avatars that serve as idealized proxy versions of ourselves. And websites often aim to profit by using gamified interfaces to keep users on-site. Browsing Wikipedia, binge-watching Netflix, or playing games on a phone, though, have no such component. They are pure consumption. It’s not an accident that the MMORPG comparison quickly disappears from the book. Even if you could treat your online activity as a Fluxus-style performance, that isn’t how most people approach it.

In lieu of any unifying aesthetic frame for these activities, we might look for persuasive case studies of each aspect of digital life taken separately. But even when it comes to the microphenomenology of things-to-be-done-online, Heffernan’s diagnoses often ring false. To take one example, she proposes that Instagram’s high-speed flow of filtered images “have become units of speech,” and that despite adhering to highly stereotyped themes, content, and visual presentation they nevertheless “look like reality.” Is this really how we understand these images, though? Even if we accept that the look of “realism” is partially conventional, the fact that the term “curated” is routinely used to describe them suggests that people are fully aware of how unreal these self-presentations are. Curation is selection, editing, artifice, not reality.

She goes on to propose that the purported artistic value of Instagram is to cut us loose from language and open our eyes to “a highly forgiving, playful, and compassionate style of looking.” Mired in language, “we come to imagine the world to be much uglier than it is.” This seems like a piece of dubiously ad hoc psychology. Here language is cast as a despoiler of reality, while in her earlier discussion of Twitter it’s celebrated as a vehicle for poetic and aphoristic insight. Individual images in Instagram move too fast to be contemplated one by one—because slowing down means less data for advertisers to mine—but the effect of staring into this blur is (somehow) to encourage slow looking in real life. There’s scant evidence for any of this. If anything, passive social media use is weakly correlated with heightened risk for depression, not deeper experiences of sensory joy.

The book also maintains a peculiar silence about the darkest aspects of online life. Apart from a glance at one (rather mild) YouTube comments thread, whole vile continents go unnamed and unscouted. Among the phenomena about which Heffernan is silent are the 4chan/8chan crowd; doxxers, stalkers, and the PUA/MRA scene; revenge porn; shitlords and troll culture; Pepe and other viral racist memes; encrypted networks where would-be terrorists swap beheading videos; and sites where makers of botnets and software viruses exchange wares. The Twitter mobbing of private individuals gets only a handful of mentions. Even pornography only surfaces in the context of YouTube’s attempts to keep it from dominating their site.

Heffernan focuses instead on the shiny public fronts of the most heavily capitalized parts of the Internet. (Her chapter on music, for instance, centers exclusively on the iPod, mp3s, and the Apple music store.) This leaves out the whole range of online behaviors that exist outside these public forums, such as people’s private search practices. Google’s own data analysts argue that people’s willingness to enter their most unspeakable thoughts into the search box reveals bottomless appetites for violent and racist content. Magic and Loss floats along within its own filter bubble, giving readers a whitewashed, middle-class, US-centric, and thoroughly consumerist vision of the Internet, one crafted to flatter techno-utopians and venture capitalists.

In the book’s final chapter, Heffernan sketches an intellectual and spiritual autobiography recounting how she gradually turned away from the smug, bruising certainties of atheistic philosophy and reductionistic science, ultimately landing in the orbit of Richard Rorty. As she tells it, Rorty’s genteel pragmatism offered a framework for justifying her religious sensibilities. Religious belief is part of a narrative, and the only grounds for holding onto or rejecting such a model of the world is whether or not it works. What she takes from Rorty is the exhortation to answer philosophical demands for any deeper justifications with the request ”to just drop it already.”

As conversation-stoppers go, that’s surely an effective one. Still, I should add that what it means for anyone’s worldview to “work” is something that, in typically Rortian fashion, goes uninterrogated here. That’s another question that only rates a bland, indifferent shrug in response. At least the old-school pragmatists like Peirce and Dewey held our worldly beliefs to a far more stringent empirical standard than just the fact that they constitute an emotionally satisfying story, though saying so probably smacks of the scientism that raises Heffernan’s hackles. In any event, this apologia was no doubt prompted in part by the vicious backlash against the widely circulated Yahoo News post in which she publicly declared her creationist beliefs. But it also provides the key to why the book’s themes never quite gel, and why a book allegedly about art has mysteriously little to say about it.

Heffernan spends pages describing the hold that Wittgenstein’s quietist pronouncements had on her, and this in turn casts retrospective light on the many suggestive passages in the book where she describes being fascinated by states of absorption, flow, trippiness, immersiveness, presence, even “rapture (or stupor).” What these have in common is being quasi-mystical or heightened states of consciousness that elude discourse. They are states of which we cannot speak—“narrative gaps” in her terms—that nevertheless show us something about the world. What the Internet seems to offer Heffernan is an always-on gateway to these sorts of experiences, a way of short-circuiting the rationalistic styles of thought her younger self found so alienating. And thus, her apotheosis: “my religious life and my technological life had both turned mystical and become one.”

In the end, then, it’s neither rigorous semiotics nor aesthetic theory that drives Heffernan’s project, but a more primal desire for transcendence. It used to be that art was meant to be our replacement for religion, a spiritual surrogate in a God-free world. Now it’s technology, with futurists like Ray Kurtzweil dreaming of a digital metempsychosis in which they will find God in the cloud. Despite its ostensible concern with seeing art in our mundane browser tabs, Magic and Loss is really the latest iteration of this urge towards rapture, a drive for something that will provide a brush with the divine. Drugs and orgies, rituals and chanting, mortification of the flesh, meditation and monasticism, burnished devotional altarpieces, abstract expressionist painting, and now the App Store. That’s progress for you. Is our pixelated trance, the constant, screen-induced buzz most of us spend our waking hours cocooned in, really advancing this search, or just numbing us to the pain of its continued failure?

[Bernard O'Leary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Virginia Heffernan became a regular visitor to the online world in the mid-80s, using primitive dial-up to access bulletin boards and RPG-themed chatrooms. To her, the internet was a text-based channel for communication with people in remote places.

My first visit to the online world was in the summer of 1995, in an internet cafe in London. I visited nme.com because it was the only website I knew, and for the next year that's what I thought the internet was: a way of reading magazines on your computer.

It's July of 2016 right now, and if you asked me what the internet is, I'd be stumped. I'd probably say that "the internet" is kind of a catch-all term for all digital communication tech, then I'd say something about Google, and iPhones, and Facebook, and then I'd probably talk a lot about Pokemon GO, which just launched this week.

In Magic & Loss, Heffernan offers a simple definition of the internet: it is a vast, collaborative work of art. And as a work of art, it can be critiqued, analysed, and something around which we can develop an aesthetic theory.

Now, if you think that developing a set of aesthetics for the entire internet is a quixotic task - well, you're right. This is more like Notes Towards..., rather than a fully functioning theory of the internet, although even thinking about digital culture as an artform in itself is a bold move. An experienced TV critic, Heffernan frequently laughs with us about how the internet is in the same cultural space that television was in 40 years ago: reviled by serious people who dismiss it as a symptom of social degeneration.

So she attacks the problem by looking at different sensory aspects of the internet. Design is an interesting place to start, because it's the one thing can be said to be truly unique to the internet. The fact is that, despite the best efforts of many visionaries, the internet is still pig ugly. It was built by engineers and refined by marketers, and the result is a kind of vast, decaying, neon megacity. There are individual acts of outstanding design, but always contextualised by the bigger mess. For now, anyway.

The internet expands and reframes all of our basic cultural activities, but none more so than reading and writing. Reading on the internet is, as Heffernan says, like drinking from a firehose. People these days consume millions of words of text each year, far more than they read in a pre-digital age.

In spite of this, there's a general acceptance that reading the internet is not "real" reading. Real reading is long, and slow, and involves ink on paper. Heffernan playfully argues against that, citing some great tweets that she believes to be as good as any poetry. She also bravely kicks the "don't read the comments" philosophy square in the crotch by arguing that comment sections are actually a form of Augustinian dialogue, a whole new rhetorical device for the development of concepts.

Yes, even YouTube comments.

The internet as a gigantic, multi-author document is different from all others though in one vital way: while we're reading it, it's also reading us. This is a thread that's touched on in other, weaker sections on digital music and video, and fully explored in a surprising final chapter, which looks at the internet as a kind of religious experience.

Heffernan has a quite complex religious history, involving Catholicism, Episcopalianism, Buddhism, Judaism and atheism, ending up in a kind of generic spirituality. The internet, as it is now in this golden age of Facebook and Pokemon Go!, is beginning to emerge as a kind of living model of that faith. It might seem spurious at first to compare The Cloud to the kind of buddhist idea of a global shared consciousness, but think about just how much of you exists there right now. Photos, notes, location data, emails, chat logs; a hugely personal part of us lives outside ourselves and, yes, it will continue to live on after our death.

Personally, I don't feel it's an exaggeration to say that digital technology has changed the nature of what it means to be human. Our main activity as a species is now, as Heffernan says, the interpretation of symbols. This.... whatever this thing is... not only deserves the same kind of critical attention that we give to other cultural forms, but it changes our understanding of culture. We need to understand this new magic, and we need to think about what's lost.

This book isn't the definitive word on the subject, but it is an entertaining and thought-provoking step in that direction.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has the makings of a great book. It asks the question of whether the internet can be seen as a vast work of art. Internet space has the shape and feel of Walt Whitman’s poetry, start to finish, energetic except for the dark spaces it tends to avoid (I can’t imagine there are many who go to it for snuff films or beheadings from extremists). Emerson’s voice is still in our heads, through technology as history, through aphorism. You can hear him saying, we aren’t surfers of the web; we are poets in the making. The beauty of poetry is that its topic is everything under the sun. The internet, likewise.

Excellent beginnings, but Heffernan soon realizes her question is metaphysical. The book has the feel of a work in progress. You can’t look at a piece of technology and use that as a substitute for experience itself. The best part of the book is Heffernan relating her personal experience among techies and nerds. And, the parts where she shows advocacy for such old-school modes of understanding as literature and philosophy (even while she says they are outmoded). Studying among the postmoderns, she ends up becoming an admirer of philosopher Richard Rorty. In this she’s no different from many of us who went to college in the 1990s (not me, I became a Deleuze-head instead). I wanted to read more of that background over receiving yet another tour of the internet. As an insider her thoughts on gaming and YouTube and Flickr-like sites etc. were nice to read but not as fascinating as her search for meaning.

The final chapter looks like it was written mainly to address her ill-advised confession on Yahoo News a few years ago when she stated she’s a creationist. Along the way she took shots at atheists too. Worse, it was written so hastily, her disgust toward the claims made under the publishing needs of pop science so evident (these ought to disgust everyone), that it came out anti-science altogether. The atheists, naturally, went batshit. The uproar was predictable to everyone but the author.

I think Heffernan’s voice on these matters need to be heard. She reminds me a little bit of Kirsten Powers (b. 1969, Heffernan b. 1969) who still considers herself politically liberal but not enough to believe in it, announcing on “The Five” on FOX News last year she’s converted to Catholicism. The problem is that Heffernan writes like she has barely begun her search for meaning. She hasn’t developed the writing skills necessary to address the kinds of huge questions that interest her most – the nature of aesthetics, for instance. The book ends up being a mishmash of undigested philosophies. A shame, really. Like McLuhan, she comes at technology from the perspective of literature and religion. Hopefully she’ll get her chops together so that she can come across as she really is, a genuine skeptic, a kind of citizen that scientists ought to be most proud of.

[Simone · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a non-fiction book that attempts to understand the internet and associated technological changes not through the language of science but through the language of arts and humanities. I thought it was great. For one, she can write a beautiful sentence like a mother-fucker. For a second, she's bringing an interesting (and for me) new perspective to technologies that tend to get written about in the same way all the time. I think most technological advancements throughout history have been met with some combination of a magic and grief. To paraphrase a line from Tony Kushner, I think we are always longing for what we've left behind and dreaming ahead. Still I think this book illuminates patterns among our use of different technologies, and also challenges us to think about the way we experience the world. Fair warnings though: this is pretty broad, she doesn't really do a deep dive on any one technology, and two, though she knows her way around the science, she's more interested in exploring the Internet as art, and so this is written in a sort of lyrical prose style. If those things sound good to you then give this a try, if you want more talk of innovation, I'd try a different kind of biography/non-fiction book.

(Many thanks to the publisher for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review, all opinions are mine.)

[John Gillespie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heffernan makes a compelling case for viewing the internet as a work of art and reminds us how easy, predictable, and unfounded some of its critics can be. It's taken a long time for me to reach the place where I can agree that the sky is falling alarmism of the internet's critics is founded on the same kind of self-congratulatory values that inspired derision of novels, radio, motion pictures, and more. Heffernan reminds us that, "all this hierarchizing of reading makes clear...how a person makes meaning of written language is a significant marker of her identity" and while "texting...is considered deeply pleasurable, addictive, subliterate, distracting, and dangerous...reading reputable-looking thick, bound books on paper...is considered exceptionally challenging, uncomfortable, and noble." I am reminded of Dana Boyd's OnBeing interview in which she recounts how she realized that the computer her brother had used to monopolize the phone line was "full of people." If you believe that people are inherently fascinating, however they express their concerns affords an opportunity to know them, and, whether through a three-volume novel or a tweet, that encounter may contain magic and loss, as Heffernan so brilliantly elucidates.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed many of the allusions & anecdotes throughout the book, and generally enjoyed Heffernan's prose stylings.

The author sets her sights high from the start -- "it's time to understand [the internet...] as the latest and most powerful extension of the project of being human" (21) -- and I found myself continually expecting her to say something more grand or profound than she does. She finally wades into those deeper waters in the last chapter. To borrow from "The Hedgehog and the Fox": in that final chapter, it seemed to me that the hedgehog in Heffernan emerges from the fox-mask imposed on us all by the internet.

[Mikealbo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Virginia Heffernan's mind has always dazzled me. And in this beautiful, intelligent, oceanic (and often funny) manifesto, she wrestles with the biggest "masterpiece" of civilization ever created, the internet, and she is in top form. Ms. Heffernan elegantly avoids both sounding like a caffeinated tech booster as well as a Debbie Downer doomsayer of the future. Someone who isn't shilling for product or just making us all feel bad and panicky? That's a rare writer. Heffernan has an optimistic, independent, genuine voice, and M&L is very much worth reading.