CN: I talk briefly about the television shows I May Destroy You and Euphoria which deal with sexual assault, mental illness, and addiction. Also, vague spoilers.

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How to represent how going online feels? Images of life online have quickly ossified into recognizable tropes. We are often presented with the image of people alone in the dark with their phones, awash in blue light. If more than one person is in the room on their phone and they are over the age of 30, we can assume that they are having trouble connecting. Groups of young people are still allowed to have fun on their phones, together in groups, because, we are to assume, theyaretogetherontheirphones. But one young girl going online alone is cause for concern because she is probably being bullied or experiencing some kind of dysmorphic and unhealthy attachment to her image on social media. Young men might be seen on dating apps or watching YouTube, which is somewhat OK but often leads them to feel sad. Little kids seem to only engage with iPads for some reason.

Online spaces, and in particular social media platforms, increasingly aren’t simply a plot point or one of the ways that characters communicate but the landscape, the structuring environment in which entire plots unfold. Whereas characters might sometimes use computers to play games, chat with friends and strangers, and discover new things at home or in public spaces such as libraries and schools, increasingly common are representations of people being physically overwhelmed or sensorily dulled by the unsolicited, yet somehow desperately sought, onslaught of information provided by a wifi signal or cell phone data. Think Euphoria’s Rue basking in the blue light of her laptop playing Love Island for hours on end, I May Destroy You’s Arabella physically stumbling over her notifications as she spirals through the streets of London, or Bo Burnham’s frenetic disco-ball “content.”

Changes in how mediated communication is portrayed in film and television make tangible this collapse between social media as a narrative object and mediating environment. Think for example of how objects like letters are used in films, often read aloud in the writer’s voice, working to extend communication across time and space. Text messages proved slightly more complicated than hand-written letters, as Tony Zhou notes. Early depictions of cell phone messages were often shown by literally panning to the screen of the phone itself, resting there long enough so that the viewer might read the messages. Later, text messages were overlaid on the image itself as if the notifications were interrupting the visual field of the story. This latter form is how life on social media is most often portrayed, more accurately representing the dings and hums that interrupt or give form to daily life with a networked device.

Michaela Coel’s Arabella attempts to keep her tether on the world through the refractive experience of being an icon for survivors of sexual assault online. In an episode of I May Destroy You entitled, “Social Media is a Great Way to Connect,” Arabella reels away from an in-person confrontation with her friends to continue posting as she wanders down the street on Halloween. The self-affirmation and inspiration offered by sharing her own traumatic experiences online, and acknowledging those of others, move Arabella to tears but increasingly leads her into a disassociative blur, stumbling, swirling, and overwhelmed. As she falters, the notifications keep coming, and the view shifts from her on the street, to the image of her feed, the fusion of life and stream complete. This depiction of the crux of trauma and “content,” ends when Arabella manages to make it into the home of her therapist. “Look at my Facebook, and my Instagram too yeah. DM after DM after DM after DM. There is so much injustice and my job is to speak the truth. I have to speak the truth no matter who to. I can’t be complicit,” Arabella recounts. Her therapist responds: “Do you need social media?” Arabella’s face scrunches up in confused response. Near the end of the episode, we see Arabella’s finger hovering above the “delete account” button as she gets back into bed. Cutting these ties allows her almost instantly to delve into the physical detritus of her trauma, living in the form of the evidence bags stored under her bed, leftover from the now-closed case against her rapist. Coel’s brilliantly complex portrait of trauma and media viscerally depicts how being on social media is simultaneously a being in conversation with, and avoidance of being in, the world.

Similarly figuring media consumption as a convenient cipher for a recognizable mental state, Zendaya, as Rue in Euphoria, is depressed and streaming TV. The intended effect of streaming, Rue says, is to wake up and realize that you have watched twenty-two episodes of the British reality show Love Island. “Some people might find that depressing,” she says, “but I do not.” For Rue, watching TV should not feel like work but more akin to being washed over with dramatic content, something to focus on, not like “the last season of Mad Men.” Unlike Arabella’s frenetic engagement with platform, Rue is a vessel for streaming content. Though we may be meant to understand that binging television is a highly visible stand-in for Rue’s depression, the viewer is also partially comforted by the notion that the endless stream is also somehow keeping her safe—streaming content standing in as the negation of a tendency towards self-harm.

Leaving all nuance aside, Bo Burnham’s Netflix comedy special, Inside, tries to capture his experience of being inside, online and hating it. Labeled as “pandemic art” due to the unusual circumstances of its production (inside, “alone,” during a pandemic), the special could just have easily have been called “Online.” Jokingly urging us to “thank daddy for the content,” Burnam describes being online as something like “experiencing a little bit of everything all of the time,” sung to a tune reminiscent of a “screamer”— the impossibly fast circus marches designed to whip turn-of-the-century circus-goers into a frenzy. About two-thirds of the way through Burnham’s special he shows himself lying on the floor amidst the tools of his trade, wrapped in a grey fuzzy blanket with his eyes close and his head on a pillow, a microphone gently lying at the level of his mouth. “I don’t know about you guys,” he says, “but um, I’ve been thinking recently that you know maybe, um, that allowing giant digital media corporations to exploit the neurochemical drama of our children for profit. You know, maybe that was, uh, a bad call by us. Maybe the flattening of the entire subjective human experience into a lifeless exchange of value that benefits nobody except a handful of bug-eyed salamanders in Silicon Valley, maybe that, as a way of life forever, maybe that’s umm.. not good.” Lest we take Burnham’s articulately inarticulate zeitgeisty take too seriously, he concludes: “I’m horny. The perfect internet segue.

Novels also struggle with how to render the interfaces of digital life without seeming clunky, often side-stepping current words like “the Internet” or the proper names of certain platforms to make strange the quotidian experience of being online. Patricia Lockwood, for example, refers only to “the portal” in her novel No One is Talking About This. Lockwood’s novel was one of several books published in 2020 that was somewhat obsessively referred to by critics as an “internet novel,” another being Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts. Both books have the protagonist’s Twitter feeds as a stand-in for the inner life, with their narrator’s inner monologue is (at least in part) described as pure tweetable potential. Both books center on attention, or the lack of it, as the definitive conundrum of internet life. Lockwood describes attention as “the soul spending itself” and the shift in inner narrative prompted by the rhetoric of social media, noting that “the mind had been, in its childhood, a place of play. It had also once been the place where you sounded like yourself. Gradually it had become the place where we sounded like each other, through some erosion of wind or water on a self not nearly as firm as stone.” After a death in the family occurs, the protagonist can’t quite understand how “the portal,” once so vital to the navigation of her existence, can go out on without acknowledging this singular tragedy. But, soon, she too returns to its steady churn and stream. In Oyler’s rendition of this experience, her snobby social-media-critical boyfriend is unearthed post-break-up as an Instagram conspiracy theorist and the dramatic arc of the novel turns out to be a social media stunt pulled for likes—a cringe-worthy depiction of the platformization of identity and self-narrative, rendering content indistinguishable from life itself. In each novel, “the portal” or “Twitter,” is taken as a self-evident form of a second identity, built on the first (and original) sense of self but only loosely committed to preserving its sanctity and well-being.

These examples all share an equivocation on the relationship between online presence and inner life, substituting one for the other in order to reify new cultural forms as stand ins for the expression of human emotion. While the widespread critique of the attention economy dominated by social media platforms is nothing new, these recent cinematic and literary representations of the act of experiencing “a little bit of everything all of the time” figure the architecture and affect of the platforms that mediate our communication and consumption of cultural content in interesting ways. Thinking about how filmmakers, comedians, and writers negotiate these emotional experiences in texts and images might help us think about how “we” would like to feel instead.

Michèle Pearson Clarke, “Don’t let these pictures fool you — what are we really seeing in residential school photos?,” Toronto Star, June 27, 2021.

Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (Random House, 2021).

**I listened to this one as an audiobook read by the author, free on the Libby app via your local public library if you’re in North America.

Listen to this song and then call a friend on the telephone.