Sometimes I like to imagine who I’d be without the internet. A better person, for sure. A person who has read more novels, possibly written one, and spent considerably less time bickering with strangers. But what if there are other, more profound, ways in which going online has changed me?
That’s the question addressed by both Benji Wilson and Kathryn Jezer-Morton in these books, which look at how the commodifying grammar of the internet has insinuated itself deep into our personalities. One explores the way we behave as consumers, and the other examines the way we shape ourselves for consumption: together, they offer a depressing insight into the way we live now.
I’ll confess that, until I read Wilson’s Rate This Book, it never occurred to me to challenge the system of rating things out of five stars. What Wilson calls ‘the humble pointy glyph’ (he loves a baroque second mention) has always seemed to me, both as a reader of reviews and as a reviewer myself, the natural and ordinary way to measure quality. But Wilson, who covers TV for the Telegraph, as well as writing for Private Eye, has thought about things more deeply. The ratings system we are all accustomed to grew out of a specific moment in capitalism: it has its roots in the travel guides of the 18th century, with their imperative to provide at-a-glance information to time-pressed tourists.
On dating apps we score each other as unthinkingly as we might score a vacuum cleaner or a takeaway
In the 20th century, star ratings spread to the arts, beginning with film. Reviewers, including Wilson, are often sceptical about them: he quotes the Guardian’s theatre critic Susanna Clapp complaining that they mean ‘people don’t read; they count’. Nonetheless, their influence continued to expand, so that today everyone is constantly invited to give their stars-out-of-five verdict on everything they buy, use or interact with. ‘The world,’ writes Wilson, ‘has quietly, possibly unthinkingly, given itself over to an abstract, unregulated field of measurement that is nonetheless now as universal as hours, minutes and seconds.’ For choice-glutted consumers, the appeal of star ratings is obvious: they give us a simple way to make a decision.
More interesting is the way they serve corporate interests. Amazon introduced them in 1997 because the company realised that an active ratings system built customer trust and led to more purchasers, regardless of whether the reviews were good or bad. But stars are constantly being gamed and abused, leading to a whole subsidiary industry that attempts to guarantee the authenticity of these opinions.
There are even star ratings for private individuals. Wilson points out that China’s social credit system is effectively giving marks out of five to citizens, but also that it’s little different to the western mania for ranking and classifying people on dating apps. We score each other as unthinkingly as we might score a vacuum cleaner or a takeaway.
Perhaps the reason we don’t find this as offensive as we should is that we’ve already been trained to think of ourselves as products. That’s the thesis of Jezer-Morton’s The Story of Your Life. It would once have been a controversial argument: when the magazine Fast Company introduced the concept of the ‘personal brand’ in a 1997 cover article, readers were incensed. As Jezer-Morton writes: ‘Today the notion of a backlash against the inevitability of personality seems quaint.’ Behaving like a brand on social media (while brands increasingly attempt to behave like people) feels as inevitable as rating things out of five, even if the results in practice are often discomforting and bizarre.
There is the strange phenomenon of private individuals posting about current affairs ‘as though they were candidates for local office’ – something Jezer-Martin first noticed in the rash of ‘thoughts and prayers’ posts after the 2012 Boston Marathon bombings. There are the ordinary women planning coordinated holiday outfits for their families as though they were Kardashians. There is the rise of the bland, universal Airbnb aesthetic as a background against which Brand You can pop.
‘Over the past two decades,’ Jezer-Martin writes, ‘we have become experts at creating and consuming internet-expressed selves… Our habits and our content have come to resemble each other.’ That is a quietly chilling summation of our culture, and it’s hard to square with the author’s determinedly non-judgmental position that hers is ‘not a technophobic argument’.
I wish there were a little more grit here, especially in the chapter about politics. Jezer-Martin is clearly sympathetic to her case studies (one anti-Trump poster and one pro-Palestine poster), whom she regards as in too deep but for understandable reasons. I wonder how a Maha anti-vaxxer would have tested that conclusion.
The strongest sections are those on ‘mommyblogging’ (the author writes a newsletter about family life for New York Magazine) and children as brand extensions. ‘No one has gone on the record to admit that they had children for the sake of growing their audience,’ she writes, but many ‘momfluencers’ will talk candidly about their children’s ‘expiration date’ as sources of engagement.
For both Wilson and Jezer-Morton, the commodified life is simultaneously bad and inescapable: neither comes out and says we should put down our phones, step away from our laptops and try to live like three-dimensional creatures. It’s true, it would be very hard to do. But these books might just convince you that your soul depends on it.
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