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The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as 'girls online', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil's bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with 'accounts' of personal 'experience'. Can a Girl Online use these platforms not only to escape meatspace oppressions, but as spaces for survival, creativity and resistance?
Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.
About the author
Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of twelve books (several co-written with DIY AIs that she coded), her publishers include Semiotext(e), Bloomsbury and Verso. She is the creator of the digital narratives, seed-story.com and miss-communication.ie. Her work has been performed/exhibited at venues including IMMA, the ICA, BETA Festival Dublin, and Sample Studios Cork. She founded and directed the online activist projects @read_women (2014-18), and @noentry_arts (2019_2024). She was the 2020 Markievicz Awardee for Literature, the 2017 UK Arts Foundation fellow for literature; an Anthony Burgess Centenary Writer Fellow at the University of Manchester and a 2024 DAAD Artists in Berlin awardee (refused in solidarity with the Palestine).
Summary
What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl.
Report
Esoteric in one breath and widely relatable in another, threaded with sly humour and enlivened with breaths of personal reflection. Ruth McKee Irish Times
