Attempting to ascribe something more vital to the site – and sites – of our woes
Written as a type of a manifesto, Joanna Walsh’s short book nevertheless retains the form of a conversational meditation. Walsh’s writing is acutely personal and raises questions that speak to the existence and agency of a woman negotiating cyberspace while juggling identities as a girl, mother, writer, etc in real life. Moreover,
it explores the nature of female identity online and the extent to which every online woman is reduced to the status of being a girl. Girl Online comprises a series of reflections – almost reveries – ‘thought experiments’ and paraphrased and expanded tweets that explore girlhood, female camaraderie, writing online, sex and the nature and meaning of work. And in spite of the promise of the book’s title, the context for these is both on- and offline.
‘To lay claim to pain is to lay claim to experience. It is also to have the option to claim experience only as pain,’ Walsh writes of the exigencies of being online for all women. The pain she refers to here is the pain of being online, the pain that comes from being seen. Although given the book’s (current) form as an offline product, Walsh clearly has some translating to do. Her writing here then incorporates various online styles – programming language, diary entries, tweets, emails, with a smattering of lyrical prose – the relative informality of which have the added effect of making the book immensely approachable for a wide range of readers. In addition to these, Girl Online brings together literary techniques more resonant with the memoir format. There are ample instances of rhetorical repetition, experimental narratives, attention devoted to real-world objects (‘books, clothes, small household objects, small decorative objects’) and theory. But for Walsh this avoidance of any one particular convention is more than an aesthetic choice.
Through Girl Online, Walsh delivers playful and lived-in observations about the online world. ‘Sometimes, like anyone else, I google myself to find out who I am,’ she writes about how she uses the internet both to see herself and to philosophise about what she sees. In this mode the book feels like a series of pronouncements, to be used as an explorer’s guide to the various experiences and limitations of being a woman online. She delves into the lives of girls and women online with a keen attention not to their emotions but to the strangeness of the entire project of ‘being’ online. ‘If a woman’s all context, a girl is all concept,’ she theorises. She is referring not just to the bloggers, writers and artists online but also to those who lurk, anonymously, on the fringes, perhaps looking for a way in or perhaps just looking.
In recreating these experiences on the page Walsh opens the gates to introspection and avoids the iciness associated with the cyberfeminism
of the likes of Gloria Steinem; moreover, her personable tone allows readers space in which to remember their own experiences online. ‘In the “attention economy”, attention can be paid even when no subject is looking,’ she writes in the chapter ‘Screen Goods’. It reminded me of an experience with which we are all familiar: the way that each time I read a news article online, pop-up ads from the page follow me to various e-commerce websites and apps even though I’ve not clicked or, in most cases, even looked at them. It’s almost as if once I’ve been privy to them, the ads and their ghosts will forever haunt me in the online highways and byways.
Girl Online is as much about questions as it is answers, with Walsh diving prismatically into her subjects: about screens she writes, ‘ok, a screen is a good, as in a commodity, and it is utile – good for something. But is it good in itself, or good for anything or anyone else? Or is it good for nothing, being the locus of much of my “useless” as well as “useful” time?’ Through these queries she also makes it clear that the reader should turn to herself and not Walsh to find any answers to these and related questions. In doing so, Walsh encourages readers to contemplate, meditate and philosophise a way to their own answers.
When Walsh writes about Paris Hilton’s Instagram photograph of herself ‘dressed for Halloween as sexy Alice in a blue satin minidress, her pinafore morphed into a waitress’s apron’, she invokes an important question that jumps out of that image: ‘She is holding a tray bearing a drink. Is it for her or is she a server?’ Meditating on this, Walsh writes, ‘Women have always been at the interface of communication technology: from telephonists and telegraph operators to “computers”, the early coders whose key-tapping associations with secretarial work tagged the profession female’. Here she connects a very contemporary, modern idea with something that goes back into time, linking up both the contemporary and the modern, online and offline. It’s this kind of grounding or contextualising that she does repeatedly throughout the text as a way, one might argue, of keeping things ‘real’.
By way of these points of entry Walsh examines the relationship between the user and the used, the looker and the one being looked at, in the context of both the internet and femininity more generally. ‘Onscreen,’ she writes, ‘woman defaults to girl – for who has more power to manifest via the pure appearance that is screen mode?’ The internet demands that women present as girls, youthful, ageless and resembling any other of the of numerous ‘girls’ that have been floating online for years. But if Walsh suggests that the internet confuses her with one of them, then it is true too that the internet encourages her to do the same. Then in no time a woman becomes a girl, and it doesn’t matter if a particular face belonged to a generation, a revolution or even a person, it’s just an appearance, a representation without any representee, just a shell.
‘Some people say the internet is not describable,’ writes Walsh. ‘This is perhaps because it is performable.’ This holds a mirror to the semiotic and discursive ways of the internet where we are almost always doing things: browsing, sharing, making TikTok videos, playing games, chatting, listening, learning, working, watching, travelling, reading and so on. From Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts, to Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, Girl Online draws itself into the cohort of internet literature (oxymoronic as it sounds) that has only been increasing. Girl Online adds a distinct layer to this. In its ‘extremely online’ format it begs to be read as both an extension of the internet, and as a page off it. And in doing so, Walsh is able to ascribe to the internet something more vital, something more wholesome. A point of departure from its ongoing mythologisation and a place where readers can actually know what it’s like to be online.
Girl Online: A User Manual by Joanna Walsh Verso, £10.99 (hardcover)
