Audiobook7 hours
Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art
Written by Virginia Heffernan
Narrated by Candace Thaxton
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
3/5
()
About this audiobook
Virginia Heffernan “melds the personal with the increasingly universal in a highly informative analysis of what the Internet is—and can be. A thoroughly engrossing examination of the Internet’s past, present, and future” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) from one of the best living writers of English prose.
This book makes a bold claim: The Internet is among mankind’s great masterpieces—a massive work of art. As an idea, it rivals monotheism. But its cultural potential and its societal impact often elude us. In this deep and thoughtful book, Virginia Heffernan reveals the logic and aesthetics behind the Internet, just as Susan Sontag did for photography and Marshall McLuhan did for television.
Life online, in the highly visual, social, portable, and global incarnation rewards certain virtues. The new medium favors speed, accuracy, wit, prolificacy, and versatility, and its form and functions are changing how we perceive, experience, and understand the world. In “sumptuous writing, saturated with observations that are simultaneously personal, cultural, and strikingly original” (The New Republic), Heffernan presents “a revealing look at how the Internet continues to reshape our lives emotionally, visually, and culturally” (The Smithsonian Magazine). “Magic and Loss is an illuminating guide to the Internet...it is impossible to come away from this book without sharing some of Heffernan’s awe for this brave new world” (The Wall Street Journal).
This book makes a bold claim: The Internet is among mankind’s great masterpieces—a massive work of art. As an idea, it rivals monotheism. But its cultural potential and its societal impact often elude us. In this deep and thoughtful book, Virginia Heffernan reveals the logic and aesthetics behind the Internet, just as Susan Sontag did for photography and Marshall McLuhan did for television.
Life online, in the highly visual, social, portable, and global incarnation rewards certain virtues. The new medium favors speed, accuracy, wit, prolificacy, and versatility, and its form and functions are changing how we perceive, experience, and understand the world. In “sumptuous writing, saturated with observations that are simultaneously personal, cultural, and strikingly original” (The New Republic), Heffernan presents “a revealing look at how the Internet continues to reshape our lives emotionally, visually, and culturally” (The Smithsonian Magazine). “Magic and Loss is an illuminating guide to the Internet...it is impossible to come away from this book without sharing some of Heffernan’s awe for this brave new world” (The Wall Street Journal).
Author
Virginia Heffernan
Virginia Heffernan writes regularly about digital culture for The New York Times Magazine. In 2005, Heffernan (with cowriter Mike Albo) published the cult comic novel The Underminer (Bloomsbury). In 2002, she received her PhD in English Literature from Harvard.
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Reviews for Magic and Loss
Rating: 3.2173913260869567 out of 5 stars
3/5
23 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)So for what it's worth, I tried very earnestly to be a fan of Virginia Heffernan's Magic and Loss, a new collection of academic essays concerning "what the internet really means." I was attracted to it when first coming across it because her main conceit is that the internet is the largest act of performance art in human history; not the individual parts that make up the internet, which ultimately are nothing special (shooting a video for YouTube is fundamentally the same process as shooting a video for VHS; writing an essay for a blog is fundamentally the same process as writing an essay for a paper magazine), but rather the way these trillion pieces of content come together, the way they influence each other, the way that humans' lives have fundamentally changed through the act of being exposed to these trillion pieces of content all at once.But books of academic essays are a hit-and-miss proposition for non-academes like me; and for every great, accessible academic writer like Malcolm Gladwell you come across, there seems to be an equal amount of books like this one, essentially 300 pages of high-falutin' masturbation, ten-dollar words, Emily Dickinson references, and endless goddamn callbacks to other academic talks at SXSW and TED. It made me grow weary of this book rather quickly, which will be the reaction of most non-academes to this as well; although if you are a full-time resident of the ivory tower, by all means take a chance on it, because doubtless you'll have a better experience than me.Out of 10: 6.5, or 8.5 for full-time academes
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5The premise behind this book is fascinating: Heffernan sets out to examine the internet as a collaborative work of art. Unfortunately, she doesn't deliver. I read the first few chapters, and then got frustrated and skimmed a few other sections. All in all, I probably read about 50% of the book. It's possible that I missed some of the more cogent parts of her argument.This feels much less like it is about the internet as a whole, than it is about Hefferman's experience of the internet. I don't see evidence of much research. That's okay, for what it is worth, but at no point does Hefferman make that clear.I'm not sure who Hefferman's audience is. It's like she's writing this for people who have never actually used the internet, yet still somehow have nostalgia for internet culture. For instance, she spends several pages defining what a hashtag is. That gives all of her writing a weird abstract quality. If there is an argument to this book, I couldn't follow it. The introduction talked about the dichotomy of magic and loss, and it seemed that that was going to be what the book was about, but I didn't find discussions of magic or loss in anything else I read.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5It's refreshing to read a book of culture criticism that is Internet-positive. I think the Text, Images, and Video chapters were stronger and had a stronger argument. Heffernan lost me for awhile in the last chapter when she discusses her philosophical and religious backgrounds, but she brought it back to her argument back at the very end.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Free review copy. Heffernan is a culture writer for the NYT, and this book is a bunch of meditations on the aesthetics of the internet. From the internet, she argues, we can truly appreciate things like America’s culture of overincarceration, when we find huge message boards dealing with inmates and their families. There are benefits and costs to this new way of being; one cost, she suggests, is dignity—she recounts doing journalism-lite for a website, and compares Michael Pollan’s suggestion not to eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t have recognized as food; her grandmother wouldn’t have recognized rewriting headlines to draw clicks as journalism. She analogizes the rise of apps to the rise of gated communities, making the experience for app users cleaner, safer, more expensive, and “classier” than the buzzing, blooming confusion of the web at large. She analogizes Google’s stated mission to “organize the world’s information” as the echo of “the founding tale of Western ambition: Faust’s deranged craving for unlimited knowledge.” But she also defends Twitter’s brevity, pointing out that “[t]o plenty of poets in plenty of languages, 140 symbols is expansive. Confucius’s adages were rarely longer than twenty Chinese characters.” And, in a “the more things change” moment, she points to criticisms of early bound books as not “really” reading, compared to the effort required to find something in a scroll. She also reminds us that novels were once considered dangerous to women’s minds, and then that the Kindle was designed for people to read long-form and offline—that is, for women. Best line on gender: “For years technology had seemed to be the masculine form of the word culture.”Heffernan also argues that reading for information, for highlighting, for good quotes (like I did for this review) is the American way of reading; and yet, she suggests, online, participatory reading—reading to comment, for example—is regarded by cultural gatekeepers as “impure,” inferior, to “serious” reading which is done in books and without immediate response. I was charmed by the idea that “America in the age of rye surplus used to be a nation of drunks, then the overproduction of corn turned us into overeaters, [and] as words have proliferated hypertrophically on the internet, we’ve become a population of overreaders, of hyperlexics.” Guilty. Heffernan doesn’t like headphones (isolating, especially from the communal experience of listening to music) or MP3s (like trying to dine on painted grapes). She concludes that other people agree with her that something is missing from digital music because of the renaissance in live music, which is an interesting aesthetic take on what many others have presented as a business issue due to declining revenues from recorded music sales.