Protecting Your Digital Body: On Gabrielle Alexa Noel’s ‘How to Live With the Internet (And Not Let It Ruin Your Life)’
At 22, I was writing for a “news” and pop culture site that required its writers to churn out around five articles a day. Content wise, we could write about seemingly anything: details from the campaign trail, a fashion company’s latest sports bra technology, bisexual representation on television, etcetera. After about a week writing for them, my editor came to me about my low readership numbers. “What you’re writing isn’t bad,” he said. “It’s just not popular.” He asked me what I thought about writing about Kim Kardashian. Attempting to be cheeky, I said, “Isn’t Kim Kardashian writing enough about Kim Kardashian?” I didn’t last long in the position.
Cover, How to Live With the Internet (And Not Let It Ruin Your Life) by Gabrielle Alexa Noel from Rizzoli Publishing, March 23, 2020 | Fair Use
But our dialogue stuck with me as I’ve continued to navigate being a writer—rather, a person—in a click-bait, social media-heavy, digital age. Where’s the line between news and entertainment? Where’s the line between fact and opinion, or fact and lie? How intertwined is capitalism to our content? And how does that correlation influence our ability to be informed? It seemed that Gabrielle Alexa Noel’s book “How to Live With the Internet (And Not Let It Ruin Your Life)” (out March 23) fell into my lap at the most opportune time.
I was hoping Noel would tell us to rebel against the chains of the internet and demolish social media oligarchs, reclaiming our sense of selves. But I knew that wouldn’t be the case because that responsibility doesn’t lie with Noel, and our lives are so intertwined with the internet that the self-control and remodeling of our day-to-day would be counterintuitive to many of our lives.
Instead, as promised by the title, Noel makes a case for us to maintain our sanity and an overall control over how we operate in the digital sphere while not breaking our laptops in half, throwing our phones away, or otherwise limiting our screen-time to sending emails. Noel highlights that the internet is no longer an entity separate from our lives but one that is so intertwined with the rest of our lives that we often forget “the line between our physical and digital bodies isn’t always distinct.”
“In 2011, the UN called internet access a human right,” Noel writes. But from hearing about numerous cases of restrictions placed on the internet worldwide, we’re far from living up to that declaration. Yet it makes sense that the internet would be a human right. From making education more accessible (especially during COVID-19), to staying up to date with the news (as not every story gets published in print anymore), to creating communities and safe spaces that can otherwise be limited offline for marginalized and ostracized peoples, the internet is a necessity. The restriction of that necessity should be seen as a violation of human rights.
Noel further argues that countries like China, which limit their citizen’s access to the internet, and companies like Instagram, which limit what users can post based on loose and often discriminatory policies, are overstepping and abusing their powers as a means of control. And this argument makes sense. Instagram deciding what is deemed “sexually explicit” targets a slew of communities, such as sex workers or sex educators, artists, and non-white individuals. Noel argues that the decision shouldn’t lie with the corporation at all. However, while Noel offers potential solutions many of these corporations should adopt, the book is encompassed by an understanding that we might be better off incorporating an internet survival guide of sorts rather than attempting to rework the system. Not out of compliance but because she’s realistic.
But Noel’s insistence on surviving the internet is less pessimistic than I might suggest. Noel, a Black, bisexual, polyamorous influencer, and web developer, understands the pitfalls of the internet, but she also appreciates its duality, its ability to connect, and its power to positively influence its users and the world at large.
The presence of hashtags in our activism have elicited exponential growth of their corresponding movements; the internet propelled the #Metoo and #BlackLivesMatter movements onto the international stage. But in the technology age in which we live, we grapple with a clog of information, making it so that what’s important often gets lost. Noel cites that, once a movement or a topic stops trending, its discourse and subsequent actions decrease.
The internet also changed what community means. From Myspace to Facebook, to Twitter and Instagram, community has flourished. And when a community has space to grow, it fosters change in realms beyond the digital world. In this case, Noel highlights the LGBTQ+ community. Less likely to have familial safety or safe spaces, the LGBTQ+ community took to the internet to create those spaces themselves. For me, influencers such as Alok Vaid-Menon (@alokvmenon) and Chella Man (@chellaman) helped change the conversation surrounding gender and queerness in entertainment, fashion, policy, and our day-to-day.
Without the internet, without these platforms, it’s difficult to imagine the same swiftness of change. But that’s not to say we, and the internet, aren’t still falling short. Noel expresses the importance of proper internet fluency and safety, especially for young people, who are more prone to self-esteem issues and poor mental health due to internet usage. Further, we must continue to do the work for our communities and other’s, even when hashtags stop trending.
None of us are safe from mental health changes that result from being online. Noel lays out steps to combat online harassment, social burnout, misinformation, and expectations of self. The influx of true fake news makes interacting with the internet a constant game of what’s what. Between fact checking every post we see (or learning how to do that if we don’t) to comparing our lives to the digital portrayal of others, it’s difficult to maintain sanity. But if we can harness a healthy and knowledgeable relationship with the internet, we can navigate how to properly define the line between our digital and tangible bodies and learn how to take care of them both, as separate and related entities.
Ultimately, Noel reminds us that the internet is a multifaceted beast, one that changes overnight, influencing every corner of our world. And in that, learning to live with the internet and not letting it ruin our lives could be how we conquer the beast or, at least, live with it harmoniously.
Image credit: Internet street sign in Prague, 2008, James Cridland (Flickr | CC BY 2.0)
