Is Online Presence a Turnoff?
The narrator of Patricia Lockwood’s 2021 novel, No One Is Talking About This, is a caricature of an “extremely online” person. She’s constantly on her phone, inhaling an enormous amount of content each day: bizarre makeup hacks, dog videos, pictures of breakfast food and people’s bruises. Her speech is peppered with the slang and nihilistic humor of her feed. While her younger sister is focused on starting a family, leading a life that is “200 percent less ironic” than her own, she’s weeping over a clip of “a woman with a deformed bee for a pet, and the bee loved her, and then the bee died.”
Lockwood is drawing on an idea that’s become a kind of in-joke on the internet: that “onlineness” is an affliction. To be or is to be so deeply involved in the digital world that—by your own doing—you are
