Week 1 (My Year in Nonfiction) | Week 2 (Book Pairings) | Week 3 (Stranger than Fiction)
This week we’re focusing on all the great nonfiction books that almost don’t seem real. A sports biography involving overcoming massive obstacles, a profile on a bizarre scam, a look into the natural wonders in our world—basically, if it makes your jaw drop, you can highlight it for this week’s topic. Hosted by Christopher @ Plucked from the Stacks.
Overview
This week, I’m bending the topic to include a post I’ve been wanting to write for months. Some days, I find myself in awe that any online ecosystems exist at all. It doesn’t seem real to me sometimes! …That’s my argument for tieing into the weekly topic, and I’m sticking with it.
‘The social internet’ may not be the most accurate way to describe this list. I’m attempting to use that phrase as shorthand for ‘books about how we interact with the Internet and how it affects us, especially when it comes to relating and communicating with each other, how and what content we create, and how we represent or present ourselves online.’ This is something I’ve always been generally interested in, but it’s really picked up since early 2021, when I got back into YouTube and started getting into Twitch.
So here is a motley list of 11 different books related to the Internet in some way!
Read
Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil
It’s a shame I read this book during my blogging slump last summer, because I enjoyed it so much. Maybe one day I’ll reread it and give it a proper review. It was a serendipitous find as I shelved new books at work one day. Fits squarely into the genre of exploring a nonfiction topic through one’s personal experience (I think there is a word for that?). The topic is the history of the social internet, through McNeil’s experiences over the years. Recommended if you’d like to reflect on what “brought people online and what keeps us here even as the social equations of digital life—what we’re made to trade, knowingly or otherwise, for the benefits of the internet—have shifted radically beneath us.”
Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch
Finishing Lurking finally made me excited to read this book. I love language, I love the internet, this book was written for folks like me. (Too bad it is that awful yellow colour which I despise.) I don’t have too much to say about it, though. Recommended if you’re fascinated by how written language has evolved for online communication.
Everything I Need, I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It by Kaitlyn Tiffany
I came across this book earlier in the year while browsing NetGalley. My jaw dropped, because it sounded too good to be true. I shared my thoughts on this book in my first post for Nonfiction November, but icymi… Unlike Lurking, Everything I Need doesn’t quite live up to its subtitle. Nonetheless, it is a fascinating case study in how the One Direction fandom grew into various online spaces. There’s enough context given that someone outside of the fandom can still appreciate and relate to the experience of the 1D fandom. Recommended if you have ever participated in online fandom.
Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet by Tim Hwang
Reviewed October 2020. This is another title I discovered while NetGalley browsing. It argues that ineffective internet advertising has built up around inaccurate and unreliable metrics. While I felt at times that this was a technical read, I learnt a lot about how internet advertising actually functions and underpins everything. Recommended if you’re concerned about the long term sustainability of the internet as we know it.
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport
Reviewed January 2020. Likely an intriguing topic for anyone reading this post (ie anyone who spends a regular amount of time online!), Digital Minimalism is a mostly practical guide on how to manage your online time. While I don’t agree with everything Newport writes, and I think he leaves out some key considerations, I did find a lot of helpful takeaways. Recommended if the title or subtitle pique your interest at all.
To Be Read
The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World by Laurence Scott
I think this might complement Digital Minimalism? Apparently I shelved it in 2015, prior to its publication! I wonder how it’s aged.
“Tackling ideas of time, space, isolation, silence and threat – how our modern-day anxieties manifest online – and moving from Hamlet to the ghosts of social media, from Seinfeld to the fall of Gaddafi, from Twitter art to Oedipus, The Four-Dimensional Human is a highly original and pioneering portrait of life in a digital landscape.”
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place by Janelle Shane
This book is perhaps the most ‘removed’ from my primary interest of all the books on this list. But then I think about the chatbots I encounter with airlines or banks, and how those are powered by AI…
“In this smart, often hilarious introduction to the most interesting science of our time, Shane shows how these programs learn, fail, and adapt–and how they reflect the best and worst of humanity. You Look Like a Thing and I Love You is the perfect book for anyone curious about what the robots in our lives are thinking.”
Like, Comment, Subscribe: How YouTube Drives Google’s Dominance and Controls Our Culture by Mark Bergen
On the contrary to the book above, I have Like, Comment, and Subscribe on my Christmas wish list. YouTube has long been one of my favourite digital platforms, since I first watched Hank Green’s Accio Deathly Hallows via the YouTube home page in July 2007.
“Like, Comment, Subscribe is the first book to explain exactly how YouTube’s technology and business evolved, how it works, and how it helped Google grow to unimaginable power, a narrative told through the people who created YouTube and the Google engineers and chiefs who took it over.”
Better Connected: How Girls are Using Social Media for Good by Tanya Lloyd Kyi and Julia Kyi
Here is a recent addition to the TBR, thanks to one of Kathie @ Bit About Books’ Nonfiction November posts!
Forthcoming
Neither of these books have covers yet. But I am excited about the topics they will cover. Extremely Online: Gen Z, the Rise of Online Creators and the Selling of a New American Dream by Taylor Lorenz and Streamers: Fame, Fortune, and Burnout Behind the Screen by Nathan Grayson both have self-explanatory titles. I haven’t been able to find any news on either title recently. Fingers crossed they are both still forthcoming.
Are there any other books I should check out about the social Internet?
Share your links to this week’s topic in the comments!
*TBR list grows longer*
All of these sound fascinating! Dagnabbit!
Excellent, happy to help your list grow, haha 😄
The internet really is a strange place, thanks for sharing these recs. You might be interested in Swipe Up for More!: Inside the Unfiltered Lives of Influencers by Stephanie McNeal coming out next year.
Thank you so much for the rec, that sounds perfect! Sometimes I think “Technically I, a book blogger, am an influencer” but really, that’s a whole different world…
Hey, this totally counts for the topic! And also, I think every single one of these is going to end up on my TBR pile. Color me fascinated.
Thanks for stopping by Christopher! Glad I can help grow your TBR 😜
[…] Where? Falling Letters […]
[…] want to read pretty much every book on this list of books on the social internet from Jenna at Falling Letters, but most of them were already on my to-read list from earlier posts! This was the only new-to-me […]
[…] Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil, Falling Letters […]
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