Why Hate the Internet?: Contemporary Fiction, Digital Culture, and the Politics of Social Media

Abstract:This essay examines two recent “social media” novels that feature protagonists who excessively use social media technologies: Jarett Kobek’s I Hate the Internet: A Useful Novel Against Men, Money, and the Filth of Instagram (2015), and Natasha Stagg’s Surveys: A Novel (2016). Kobek’s novel offers an ironic “morality lesson” about the social and political risks digital media platforms can create for free expression and contemporary literary culture, while Surveys is driven by its protagonist’s obsessive blogging that transforms her into a minor Internet celebrity. Focusing on both texts’ thematic deployment of the Internet, I explore the productive literary anxieties that new media and digitally-mediated expression create for literary culture and authorial self-fashioning in the twenty-first century. To that end, the two novels demonstrate how the mere use of digital communication technologies has exerted great influence on how we understand the affective politics of free expression, literary authorship, and online celebrity.