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23 reviews for:
I Love My Computer Because My Friends Live in It: Stories from an Online Life
Jess Kimball Leslie
3.2 AVERAGE
23 reviews for:
I Love My Computer Because My Friends Live in It: Stories from an Online Life
Jess Kimball Leslie
3.2 AVERAGE
A year or so ago, I played a video game called “Emily Is Away Too.” It’s a (fantastic) sequel to a (fantastic) game, where you participate in a kind of choose your own adventure game on a pixelated version of AIM. The sequel is complete with links to parodies of Facebook and YouTube. It perfectly captures a bygone era, when social media started to take over how we interact with online worlds, when the Wild West of the Internet was being tamed.
That era was slightly after the time covered at the beginning of I Love My Computer; the book spans a long history, but she harbors a deep nostalgia for message boards and chat rooms (which I was on, but young). (Incidentally, I read this right after watching Eighth Grade, which was a perfect encapsulation of an era of the internet I’m now slightly too old to really understand.) As such there was lots in this book that was totally new to me even as I flashed back to the online life of my youth. (The book is even set in Times New Roman, a font you barely see nowadays but because it is the default font, in the early days of the internet was the font you saw everywhere.)
It’s when she starts cultural critique of the modern Internet age that this book goes from fun to absolutely essential reading. The history of twitter as a marketing tool has stuck with me months later - it’s affected how we use the word “innovation!” - and I’ve never seen as incisive a history as her first Blackberry changing how we all relate to the concept of “work.”
And yet even as she points out how the Internet is toxic and has changed the world for the worse, she is still a child of the Internet. Like myself, she would be worse off without the support system the internet created. It’s rare - but becoming more common, to be fair - to find writing on the internet that balances its still-dizzying possibilities, even 30 or 40 years in, and also its creeping danger.
I don’t read too many essays anymore. When I picked up this book I thought it was a memoir. I couldn’t be happier to be wrong. Like Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays, this was at times funny, at times poignant, at times touching, and at all times incisive, insightful, and thought provoking.
That era was slightly after the time covered at the beginning of I Love My Computer; the book spans a long history, but she harbors a deep nostalgia for message boards and chat rooms (which I was on, but young). (Incidentally, I read this right after watching Eighth Grade, which was a perfect encapsulation of an era of the internet I’m now slightly too old to really understand.) As such there was lots in this book that was totally new to me even as I flashed back to the online life of my youth. (The book is even set in Times New Roman, a font you barely see nowadays but because it is the default font, in the early days of the internet was the font you saw everywhere.)
It’s when she starts cultural critique of the modern Internet age that this book goes from fun to absolutely essential reading. The history of twitter as a marketing tool has stuck with me months later - it’s affected how we use the word “innovation!” - and I’ve never seen as incisive a history as her first Blackberry changing how we all relate to the concept of “work.”
And yet even as she points out how the Internet is toxic and has changed the world for the worse, she is still a child of the Internet. Like myself, she would be worse off without the support system the internet created. It’s rare - but becoming more common, to be fair - to find writing on the internet that balances its still-dizzying possibilities, even 30 or 40 years in, and also its creeping danger.
I don’t read too many essays anymore. When I picked up this book I thought it was a memoir. I couldn’t be happier to be wrong. Like Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays, this was at times funny, at times poignant, at times touching, and at all times incisive, insightful, and thought provoking.
This started off amazingly, but lost its sense of direction- and even connection to the subject - as the book progressed. I think it needed to be longer, or split into specific essays, or just more focused.
Windows 95 in particular should have arrived strapped to a box of Franzia.
When eBay came to be, it was as if my father’s personal prayers had been answered: the world’s largest junkyard, brought to you by computers? Christ had welded all of my dad’s interests together.
When eBay came to be, it was as if my father’s personal prayers had been answered: the world’s largest junkyard, brought to you by computers? Christ had welded all of my dad’s interests together.