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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 seven books, including
Hotel,
Vertigo,
Worlds from the Word's End and
Break*up she also works as a critic, editor, teacher and arts activist. She is a UK Arts Foundation fellow, and the recipient of the Markievicz Award in the Republic of Ireland. She founded and ran #readwomen (2014-18), described by the
New York Times as "a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers" and currently runs @noentry_arts.
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
