The Voice That Gets Lost Online

The Internet gave us a new language. Did it take one away?
A blue spiral of text emojis symbols figures going inside a phone.
Illustration by Somnath Bhatt

Patricia Lockwood created a Twitter account in 2011. Right away, she knew what to do with it. “Free in the knowledge that no one was listening, I mostly used it to tweet absurdities like ‘ “Touch it,” Mr. Quiddity moaned. “Touch Mr. Quiddity’s thing,” ’ ” she writes, in her memoir “Priestdaddy” (2017). Back in those days, people tended either to dismiss Twitter as one of the stupider things to have happened in human history—the whole world should care what you had for lunch?—or to celebrate it as a revolution that would usher in a golden age of democracy and peace. Tuna-fish sandwiches versus the Arab Spring: that was the crux of the debate. Fewer saw that the form could be a kind of fiction, an exercise in pure persona sprung from the manacles of story, or even sense. All you needed was style, and Lockwood had it. (It helped that she was a poet, a fondler and compressor of language.) Her best tweets were tonally filthy but textually clean, like a clothed flasher, their voice so intrinsic to the new medium, so obviously online, that if you tried to explain to a parent or an offline friend what you were laughing at you ended up sounding like a fool. “Tweeting is an art form,” Lockwood tells her skeptical mother, in “Priestdaddy.” “Like sculpture, or honking the national anthem under your armpit.” She made it seem like it was.

A decade has passed since those happy days. Twitter did not usher in a definitive dawn of democracy abroad. Democracy in America has barely survived it. Meanwhile, much of the medium’s fun has gone sour and sharp. Twitter is still a comedy club and a speakers’ corner, the cozy back booth at an all-night diner. It’s also a stoning square, a rave on bad acid, an eternal Wednesday in a high-school cafeteria, an upside-down Tower of Babel pointing straight to human hell. What began as one of the biggest literary experiments since the birth of the world, everyone invited to shoot out words from their fingers at any time, has calcified into a genre clogged with clichés, one of which Lockwood has taken as the title of her first novel, “No One Is Talking About This” (Riverhead). To translate for the offline: this is what someone says in a clutch of outrage upon discovering a topic or bit of news—one which, it is safe to assume, many people are already talking about.

Why are we still On Here? Twitter users often ask with the desperation of the damned, and the answer that Lockwood’s book immediately gives is that we are addicts. What opium did to the minds of the nineteenth century is no different than what the Internet—“the portal,” as Lockwood calls it—is doing to the minds of the twenty-first. We know this from science, some of us from experience, but Lockwood is out to describe that sensation of dependency, the feeling of possessing a screen-suckled brain—or of being possessed by it. Thomas De Quincey, plugged full of poppy, reported sitting at a window “from sunset to sunrise, motionless, and without wishing to move,” and something similar happens to Lockwood’s unnamed protagonist when she sits in front of her computer screen:

Her husband would sometimes come up behind her while she was repeating the words no, no, no or help, help, help under her breath, and lay a hand on the back of her neck like a Victorian nursemaid. “Are you locked in?” he would ask, and she would nod and then do the thing that always broke her out somehow, which was to google beautiful brown pictures of roast chickens—maybe because that’s what women used to do with their days.

A digital ailment demands a digital cure: this is funny, sad, and right, as is the telling grammatical slip at the end of the paragraph, which implies that women used to Google chickens rather than cook them. Lockwood is sending a bulletin from the future, when, horrifyingly, such things will be said of her generation, and be true.

That historical anxiety, directed both at the past and the future, is acutely felt by Lockwood’s protagonist, who, like Lockwood herself, is a married woman in her late thirties who has found real-world eminence by being very online. She is a kind of diplomat from the digital world, paid to travel around the globe to give lectures and appear on panels, at which she tries to explain things like “why it was objectively funnier to spell it sneazing.” Her public is not always receptive to such meditations. At an appearance in Bristol, an audience member brandishes a printout of the post that shot her to fame—“Can a dog be twins?”—and tears it in two. “This is your contribution to society?” he asks, stomping out.

Here is a reply guy in the flesh, a sneering man who reminds the protagonist that she is silly, unserious, a woman—a fact that Lockwood’s protagonist, in spite of professing no particular attachment to what the portal has taught her to call “her pronoun,” knows all too well. Digital optimists like to say that social media is just a supercharged update of Enlightenment café culture, with tweets passed around instead of pamphlets. But Lockwood’s protagonist knows that she is excluded from that vision of the past. While the men, class permitting, read and debated, she would have been doing the washing and birthing the children; as recently as the fifties, a friend reminds her, the two of them would likely have been housewives. So what does it mean that she, a woman in the historically anomalous position of determining the course of her own life (notably, she is childless), is choosing to spend her days and nights glued to the portal, looking at “a tarantula’s compound eyes, a storm like canned peaches on the surface of Jupiter, Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters, a chihuahua perched on a man’s erection”? What is her contribution to society?

The novel itself is one answer. “Stream-of consciousness was long ago conquered by a man who wanted his wife to fart all over him,” the protagonist tells the audience at one of her events. “But what about the stream-of-consciousness that is not entirely your own? One that you participate in, but that also acts upon you?” The comparison to Joyce, the man who wanted his wife to fart all over him, is bold, and telling. Lockwood has set out to portray not merely a mind through language, as Joyce did, but what she calls “the mind,” the molting collective consciousness that has melded with her protagonist’s singular one. And, as Joyce did, she sets about doing it through form. “No One Is Talking About This” is structured as a kind of riff on the tweet scroll, discrete paragraphs (many two hundred and eighty characters or less) arranged one after another to simulate, on the fixed page, the rhythm of a digital feed. This method—dense bulletins of text framed by clean white space—is not revolutionary, or even innovative. It was used in the seventies to great effect by novelists like Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwick, and it has become newly popular over the past decade as a way to mimic a fragmented, flitting modern consciousness—often that of a woman who is harried by competing demands on her attention. It is a permissive form, tempting to use and easy to abuse, since, paradoxically, the arrangement of disconnected beats implies a unity of meaning that the text itself may not do enough to earn.

The critic Lauren Oyler, a skeptic of the fragmented method, parodies it in a long section of her own novel, “Fake Accounts,” another recent début about life lived in the shadow of the Internet. “Why would I want to make my book like Twitter?” Oyler’s narrator asks. “If I wanted a book that resembled Twitter, I wouldn’t write a book; I would just spend even more time on Twitter.” The question of how to represent the digital world in language has become only more interesting, and more urgent, as it has become clearer that the Internet is not just a device but an atmosphere, a state of being. We’re always online, even when we’re off, our profiles standing sentry for us at all hours, our minds helplessly tuned to the ironic, mocking register of well-defended Internet speak. That is exactly the voice of Oyler’s narrator, who, like Lockwood’s protagonist, is a young white millennial woman who resembles her author in sundry particulars, as a digital avatar might. Oyler’s narrator is entertainingly critical of digital life even as she is formed by it; it is her milieu, and the novel confronts its artifice, in part, by confessing its own. Sections of the book are labelled with the equivalent of highway signage (“MIDDLE (Something Happens)”); its title, which is seemingly descriptive—the novel’s nominal plot is launched by the narrator’s discovery that her boyfriend has an alt-right persona on Instagram—doubles, usefully, as a definition of fiction itself. When she is feeling cheeky, the narrator addresses her presumed readers, a silent gaggle of ex-boyfriends: the same audience that she might imagine checking out her social media accounts, keeping tabs.

Lockwood is up to something more sincere. She embraces the fragment because she has set herself the challenge of depiction; the medium becomes the message, the very point. Thoughts about fatbergs, videos of police brutality (the protagonist is “trying to hate the police”—not easy, given that her father is a retired cop), baby Hitler, the word “normalize,” and on and on and on, all of it sluiced together and left to lodge in the hive mind: that is what Lockwood wants to show us, and wants to see more clearly for herself. “Someone could write it,” Lockwood’s protagonist tells a fellow panellist, a man who has earned fame by posting “increasing amounts of his balls online.” It would have to be done, she thinks, as a “social novel,” a documentation of the mores and habits of the portal collective. “Already when people are writing about it, they’re getting it all wrong,” she says. But Lockwood gets it right, mimicking the medium while shrewdly parodying its ethos:

“P-p-p-perfect p-p-p-politics!” She hooted into a hot microphone at a public library. She had been lightly criticized for her incomplete understanding of the Spanish Civil War that week, and the memory of it still smarted. “P-p-p-perfect p-p-p-politics will manifest on earth as a racoon with a scab for a face!”

                 * * *

Every day we were seeing new evidence that suggested it was the portal that had allowed the dictator to rise to power. This was humiliating. It would be like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian.

                 * * *

Some people were very excited to care about Russia again. Others were not going to do it no matter what. Because above all else, the Cold War had been embarrassing.

The rampant political anxiety and grandstanding; the fear of judgment and social embarrassment (and the keen pleasure of doing the judging); above all, the unstable, seductive “we” with its exquisite promise of togetherness: Lockwood has it all down, and she is funny about it, too. God, is she funny! She would not be capable of not being funny if she tried, and that is another thing that worries her protagonist. A certain kind of humor—borderline nonsensical, detachment touched with nihilism—is the tonal currency of the portal, but, if everything is treated as a joke, reality quickly warps, and so does judgment. At dinner with the ball-poster, the protagonist orders “the worst thing on the menu on purpose, to be funny.” Her cat is not named something cute, like Mittens, but something knowingly grotesque: Dr. Butthole. These choices, ironic assertions of bad taste, are a way to signal her membership in the online group. But they also amount to a concession, a sacrifice of individuality. (Oyler’s narrator has a similar problem; she prides herself on her irony, which she believes to be a distinctive, “marginalized” characteristic, while her normie friends, wiser than they realize, tell her that she “didn’t have to be so clever all the time.”) Even the protagonist’s younger sister, who, we are assured, is “leading a life that was 200 percent less ironic than hers,” has caught the bug: “Lol, her little sister texted. Think if your body changes 1-2 degrees . . . it’s called a fever and you can die if you have one for a week. Think if the ocean has a fever for years . . . lol.” The prospect of the death of the world is so overwhelmingly grim that it can be acknowledged only with the semaphore of a laugh.

Lockwood’s conceit is smart, her prose original, hugely entertaining and witty, but these things alone aren’t enough to sustain a novel. Something needs to happen to interrupt the lulling rhythm of life in the portal—something that matters—and it does. In the second half of the book, the protagonist’s little sister, who is pregnant, discovers that the child she is carrying suffers from severe developmental defects. The head is growing too fast compared to the rest of the body, a condition that sounds like a metaphor for portal life made distressingly literal. The protagonist flies home to Ohio to help her family as they wait for the baby to be born. (And it must be born: her sister is barred from legally seeking an abortion in the state.) The doctors assume that the child will be stillborn, or will die soon after birth; the parents, not quite parents yet, bravely head to the hospital, prepared to say hello and then goodbye. But the baby lives.

Here the novel picks up speed, its fragmented method allowing events to transpire very quickly. (An excerpt ran in the magazine.) The units of text no longer simulate the whirlpool rhythms of the portal, but represent the passing of real time—time fractured by exhaustion, anxiety, and waiting, as the protagonist and her family hang out at the hospital, speak to doctors, consider their options. In the midst of all this human drama, the protagonist finds that her online consciousness carries over from the earlier part of the book; it is still encrusted in her way of thinking, though she hardly goes on the portal anymore. “I’ve been this way so long, I don’t know how to be anymore,” she thinks, after drafting a dirty post about an ultrasound in her head.

But she learns. A new way of being comes to her, gradually and instinctively. “She remembered the peculiar onrushing pain of the portal, where everything was happening except for this. But for now, the previous unshakeable conviction that someone else was writing the inside of her head was gone.” That is a powerful, paradoxical observation about what digital platforms take from us, the way our inner voices get elided when they are sent out into the public sphere. A person’s mind needs the shade of privacy to thrive, and Lockwood’s own writing takes on new depth and a more focussed, richer beauty as her protagonist gets farther from the portal and deeper into the tangible present. The baby is disabled; strangers gawk, but the family cannot find a fault in her. Lockwood’s writing grows radiant, as if the depiction of this little creature gives her the profoundest joy. What is especially moving is that this is not some parable about a mother’s mystical devotion; it is a story, simply, about love, selfless and delighted. (Judging from the book’s dedication and its acknowledgments, Lockwood’s deep feeling comes from experience.) And it isn’t, either, a story with an easy moral for us to take home, How I Quit the Internet for Good. The same portal will be waiting for the protagonist when she’s ready to return to it; the difference will be private, internal, burrowed in the secret place where only novels go.