Stuck in web of our own wasted online emotions

‘The internet’ doesn’t have feelings, it just reflects yours, writes Abby Ohlheiser.

Hey. Just so you know, the internet cannot “feel” anything. It doesn’t love or hate a meme or an outfit. It doesn’t “lose its mind,” because it does not have a mind. People do. And they often don’t agree with each other.

“The internet” didn’t lose its mind about former White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s upside-down flag pin in March. A bunch of reporters and members of “Politics Twitter” did. Others probably thought it was no big deal. And still others on the internet probably never even knew about it. Even with President Donald Trump’s constant tweets, the number of Americans actively using Twitter in the United States is dropping.

I’m a digital culture reporter, so I write a lot about conversations that are happening on the internet. And this particular way of referring to those conversations — that “the internet” is feeling or saying whatever it is the story documents with a bunch of embedded tweets — is wrong, and we should know better.

A quick Google search reveals I’m not even the first person to be mad online about this.

I’m also a repeat offender. These are all headlines on stories that I’ve written:

“The Internet won’t let Harambe rest in peace.”

“A man clobbered protesters with a bike lock at a Berkeley rally, police say. The Internet went looking for him.”

“Is it ‘Internet’ or ‘internet’?

The Internet can’t agree.”

Please feel free to smugly tweet this story at me if I ever do this again.

The thing is, it’s likely I will slip up and use “the internet” to refer to a trend I see online, because it’s become the main phrase we use to describe those trends. At the Baffler in 2015, Jacob Silverman kind of nailed why:

“When we look at our browser windows, we see our own particular interests, social networks, and purchasing histories scrambled up to stare back at us. But because we haven’t found a shared discourse to talk about this complex arrangement of competing influences and relationships, we reach for a term to contain it all. Enter ‘the Internet.’ ”

Like many online phenomena, this tendency has been weaponized lately. I spend a lot of time writing about how the proTrump parts of the internet build their messaging, which is one place you can see this weaponized “voice of the internet” in effect.

For people who don’t follow many of these personalities, a look at how they cheered on the Comey hearings, or celebrated Donald Trump Jr’s decision to tweet his emails about a meeting with a Russian attorney.

In the non-#MAGA world, both of those events were likely discussed as “bad” for Trump. The pro-Trump internet’s biggest personalities work with each other to create an alternative narrative, one that is always good for Trump and his supporters, perhaps to get it trending using an agreed-upon hashtag. This, they claim, is the “true” voice of the internet.

It’s both and neither. “The internet” can feel two things simultaneously.

It can also feel apathy. It can rise up to call out a family that built a YouTube career off of pulling disturbing pranks on their own children. It can ruin the life of a Nintendo spokeswoman after falsely accusing her of changing a few female video game characters. It can insist on naming a boat “Boaty McBoatface,” and it can name the wrong people as members of the Ku Klux Klan. Really, “the internet” didn’t do any of these things. It was the medium through which human beings did it to each other.

“The internet,” as a term, is a symptom of the fact that the internet sometimes acts like a mirror when we think it’s a window. It’s not that the trends credited to the views of “The internet” are fake. It’s that they’re usually just the ones we were looking for.

The Washington Post

‘The internet’ didn’t lose its mind about former White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s upsidedown flag pin.