jeffrey rosen's article "the web means the end of forgetting" sat on the coffee table for a month because the images that accompanied it in the new york times magazine last july were, as i wrote, cute. (they're not included at the article behind that first link, but they are still up at nytimes.com for anyone with a subscription.) i do remember that i got around to reading it, but i don't remember anything specific from the contents beyond the ideas that are inferrable from the graphics. nonetheless, i remember the gist, and i don't regret not taking the pictures' words at face value and ultimately reading the article -- although i'm not going to read it again.
the gist of the irony implicit in the "ctrl identity" and "delete adolescence" keys and the surge protector with "reset reputation" written above its lit red toggle is the title of the article: the web means the end of forgetting because everything on the internet is saved. and that makes it seriously difficult (if not all but impossible for the more invested) to disestablish a reputation. no recantations of opinion, no cleaning the slate. no rewritings of personal histories, especially if you use the internet to write, and even less so if people use the internet to write about you. the library of congress started archiving every public post on twitter just over a year ago. the t-shirt aphorism of "you are what you tweet" couldn't be more groan inducingly true.
joshua cohen is a writer, and he wrote a short story about it. the title of the story is "emissions," which is also the title of a blog in the story, which was published in the spring 2011 issue of the paris review. (that link of course makes it easy for you to share the blurb with your friends and followers online.) in addition to the topic of online reputations, "emissions" is also about dealing cocaine and a frustrated labor market. we shouldn't even begin to assume, however, that joshua cohen has dealt cocaine for lack of other employment options, because even if we take the easy road of equating his narrator with himself, "This isn't that classic conceit where you tell a story about someone and it's really just a story about yourself." cohen delivers that disclaimer in sentence one, and thereby removes himself twice.
"emissions" tells a story about a young man named richard monomian (mono), but that story is told by an unnamed man (less likely a woman but not impossible) who met mono at a biergarten in berlin before the former moved back to new york. mono had been a coke dealer in new jersey. he'd wanted something else, but hadn't had any luck, even after falsifying his educational and employment information on his various applications to the entry level. one day, he gets a call. he didn't get the job. "are you aware of your Internet?" he wasn't, but it takes him only one quick search to find out that his reputation is a mess, and the mess was made -- well, by him at first, but then related -- at "emmissions," one of "upwards of thirty anonymous weblogs...all irregularly updated, but all updated," by one of his customers. then the action. it's not easy to redact the online record. and that record is permanent. a banner ad in one of my open windows reassures that "online rants can ruin reputations," but the ad by reputation.com looks wildly uninteresting compared to cohen's story, so i'm not clicking through.
as with writing about sex that isn't erotica, writing about the online world for venues that aren't strictly for techy audiences can be tricky, especially as fiction. just like with sex, the internet and our tools for accessing it might be everyday -- even pedestrian -- but they can seem completely out of their milieu when they appear on the page. not in "emissions." cohen's introduction of the problem blog is executed naturally, and his descriptions of the proliferation of the offending information on mono across the internet as well as of a gaming session that mono has with his dealer boss are incorporated seamlessly into the physical world of the text. they're exceptional exactly because they don't stand out of the story like some kind of eye-popping sci-fi interfacing.
does cohen blog? play video games? does it matter? only to the extent that his refreshingly deft treatment of the increasingly ubiquitous experience of tech might be the result of his generational experience (he was born in 1980). in other words, maybe the worst is behind us as far as technology in fiction goes. probably, though, cohen is just a skilled writer. if one thing's for sure, we definitely shouldn't assume that he ever sold cocaine in new jersey. after all, i understand my responsibility to cohen's online reputation. i expect that he'll return the favor and write something nice about me down the road. if not, i can change my name and move. just not to berlin. my mother's maiden name is german. who knows what's already online about my new handle. berlin might be too similar to portland anyway: as cohen's narrator states early, "nobody in Berlin works."
tired of it all? just scared? get offline. get out while you still can. reading away from the internet can be just as fulfillingly distracting. i know a guy named joshua cohen has written some stuff.
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for the record (and from an interview with joshua cohen):
ReplyDeleteInterviewer: Okay, so: mostly what I loved about this story was a meta-thing, which was that it was not true.
Cohen: “Meta-thing”—that sounds like a nefarious robot, or a late-night omelet. Anyway, I’m with you; it’s not true, it’s fiction.
Interviewer: But I am still too traumatized from the daily onslaught of interactions with Internet people and their tsunami of experiences and opinions and consumer preferences to know how to fashion prose from anything other than what I know or feel at any given time actually happened and/or was true. Which is to say, I know for a fact this story, “Emission,” about a twenty-something exposed on the Internet as a sexual deviant, is based, partly, on “real-life events,” because you admitted in an earlier e-mail to being inspired by a terrible night we spent with that dreadfully boring coke dealer someone inadvertently brought home one night after an n+1 party, a Tunisian I’ve been condemned to wonder about repeatedly, unimaginatively, since Tunisia spread the Facebook meme of democracy across Arabia.
Cohen: There won’t be a sequel, I don’t think (unless you decide to write one and post it online without approval). But as for “inspired by”: yes, Methyl, the dealer in “Emission” is half based on that “Tunisian” (read: New Jerseyan) coke dealer we brought home that night, who so mercilessly hit on you and, I believe, stayed for breakfast. My man’s other half is another dealer who calls himself, seriously, Blo J. When I used that name in the story, Lorin suggested, “Change it. No dealer’s called that.” Good edit, bad sense of reality. Let that be the slogan for the “new” Paris Review.
on the meta-thing thing: a post at a kind-of book blog about a kind of book that's kind of about blogging. interesting?
ReplyDeleteyeah. sorry. it's me, christopher.