Virginia Heffernan on Magic and Loss, and Why She Sees the Internet as Art (2024)

“Vogue readers probably don’t dip this low, but I do love those haul videos,” the writer Virginia Heffernan admits by phone (if you’re not familiar, she’s referring to Internet videos in which a vlogger unveils the spoils of a recent shopping spree). “Person after person emptying shopping bags and telling you what they bought. There’s just something extraordinarily interesting about how American consumerism can be dramatized on that intimate level.”

Heffernan and I have landed on this topic because we’re discussing her new book, Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. As the subtitle suggests, her thesis is that the Internet can be regarded as “a massive, collaborative work of realist art,” not quite life itself, but “an extraordinarily seductive representation of the world.”

She makes her case using the tools of literary criticism—she’s a longtime television critic, currently a writer on digital media for The New York Times Magazine, and an English literature PhD—to unpack what she calls the Internet’s “aesthetics and poetics,” tracing the evolution of design, text, images, video, and music on the Web. And in a very personal last chapter, Heffernan also considers the evolution of her own interest in technology—she was a Web early adopter as a kid in Hanover, New Hampshire, in the 1970s—and how that’s intersected with her complex feelings about religion and God (she has “found that a minimalist theism serves her best.”)

The World Wide Web: even the name suggests something ever expanding and impossibly vast; it can hardly be summed up in a few hundred pages. And as Heffernan’s title suggests, the Internet—full of magic, yet naggingly redolent of loss—contains such an irreconcilable duality as to elude easy codification.

What she presents is less a road map and more a user’s guide: a mode or system of how to look at the Internet’s style and interpret its values, both now and into the future. “I want to show how readers might use the Web and not be overwhelmed by it,” she writes. “How we might stop fighting it, in short, and learn to love its hallucinatory splendor.”

And that, it’s clear, is basically her own attitude. Heffernan’s affection and enthusiasm for haul videos extends to Kindles, the game Angry Birds (she once enjoyed a run on the global top-1,000 leaderboard), a much-fretted-about speed-reading app called Spritz, and Instagram, both “Shiva the destroyer” and a reminder that “life is beautiful and it goes by fast.” (It strikes me that the same could be said of the Web more generally.)

We chatted about Heffernan’s Internet boosterism, why the Web is making us such manic readers and writers, and why she wanted to write her own technological bildungsroman.

The central conceit of the book is that the Internet is a work of art. I think of art as something made deliberately. The Internet is a hodgepodge. How is it art? I think of it as a system of artifacts that typically is known by the word civilization. If you think of other civilizations, like Rome, there’s engineering and everything up to frescoes. We’ve told the story of the Internet for so long as the story of an engineering marvel, a business story, sometimes a military story. But culture, the culture that now finds expression in Snapchat and Instagram and Pinterest and Twitter and Facebook, grew up right alongside. I wanted to write the culture workers into the history of the Internet.

Your title reflects a dichotomy: The Internet is magical but something is lost in the life lived online. Do you think the magic outweighs the loss? I grew up in the ’70s, and I happened to be able to dial into a mainframe as a child and a preteen. During that time I felt both dazzled and blown away, like when you see something sublime and overwhelming: the night sky, the ocean, or the Alps. Literally it looked like the night sky on these old computers. It was this deep, endless, dark background with the green letters. As a child I tried to fathom what was back there in that dark.

If I could see you in person, you might gesture—at your phone, at the air around you—when you refer to the Internet. It’s all around us. But where is it? It’s partly in our brains, in our homes, in the ether, in the tubes. It acquires this almost divine, mysterious quality, where we can park all kinds of ideas. That was the magic.

That term loss comes from sound engineering. MP3s are crushed and flattened down, and engineers call that kind of compression lossy. When you ask them what’s lost, they have a hard time articulating it. I felt this nagging sense of grieving: Maybe I’m going to miss out on the best experiences of existence because I happen to have come of age in a time when our eyes are on our phones 50 percent of our waking hours.

Perhaps you worry about that sometimes, but I get the sense that you’re a booster for the Internet. Absolutely! I sometimes try to curb it because I don’t want to sound too cheerleading. I’ve seen my industry hurt by it. I know there are a lot of casualties. But I also believe when you liken something to art and civilization, it encompasses both magic and loss. All art is not magical. That kind of pain, there’s something wonderfully bittersweet in it. We’re so lucky to be around in an almost cartoonishly poignant transition. We’ve never seen anything like this before. Having the human brain and heart keep pace with this amount of change is extremely challenging and exhilarating.

There are a lot of dichotomies in the book. You say we’ve moved away from an Internet based on text—RIP BlackBerry?—but at the same time, we’ve become these hyperlexic readers, people who risk death to read and write texts. How do you reconcile those two ideas? The Internet has a tangled relationship with ordinary language. The second Apple saw Xerox’s beautiful bitmap, which became the pixmap we use now, they realized the screen could be built as a fully visual experience. There are a lot of dyslexic programmers, programmers who are much better at finding and seeing bugs out of the corners of their eyes than they are just reading in a linear way. So, especially at Apple, they created a lot of anti-text devices, all the way up to the iPhone, where you’re dealing in iconography, the little apps that we recognize as if they’re letters in the Chinese alphabet. That was a big change.

At the same time, language is ferocious, and it digitizes so well. And there’s another juggernaut that loves text: Google. I don’t want to forecast anything, but if you map Apple’s falling stock price, a lot of people think their days may be numbered, because they’ve stuck so much to hardware, but at another level, because they set the bar so high for themselves for bandwidth. They’re so determinedly visual and design oriented, where Google could thrive before widespread broadband, and it can thrive after. It’s anti-design.

For people who like text, it pours in through every little portal we have. That constant tapping and typing on anything that looks like a QWERTY keyboard has become so habitual, I think, because it seems now like the fastest and most expressive way to communicate. It’s certainly not voice; our lines are constantly breaking up and people have conceived this dislike for voice mail. And it’s not images, because they’re so cumbersome.

Let’s talk about images. You write that Internet-age photography is highly sentimental and not big on documentary power. We look to video now as the highest register of reality. Do you feel photography has ceded documentary ground? The first promise of photography was that it would show the world as it really is. You’d have a daguerreotype made rather than have John Singer Sargent paint your portrait. I think Canon started to advertise in the ’90s that it could render colors that pop. I was like, that’s what we want? Little did I know that Flickr would follow with this very stylized, high-dynamic range, and then Instagram, where photos are supposed to look like decomposed photos from the material world.

That’s fallen away a little bit; we’ve gotten tired of it. But I wouldn’t totally laugh it off. I fell for some of those rose-colored-glasses filters. It was a way into rapid-fire un-self-conscious photography. It hid a multitude of sins for people who were not instantly used to this degree of exhibitionism.

It’s so easy to laugh at any new form. Okay, so Instagram is filled with self-portraiture: There have been periods in history where painters have been drawn to self-portraits. There are reasons for that. We’re 30 years into the Internet and five or six years into Instagram. It’s only going to get more and more interesting.

In the last chapter, you spell out your personal journey with the Internet and with religion. It’s a big change of tone. Why go there? I wrote the book over a tough period in my life. I chronicle a tiny piece of that, but it was not actually the really tough part; it was just a moment in the Twitter coliseum where I got called a lot of names for writing a piece people didn’t like. I was really trying to get through the building blocks of the Internet: What made it art, what I think are the foundations of a new language, what poetry is in its essence, could Twitter qualify, what is photography, and what do we want from realist images on Flickr and Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat? It ended up being very probing. I was alone a lot. I fell through the looking glass, and I wanted to take the measure of how I had arrived there.

People who are dazzled by the Internet—it’s not a secular bunch. When you talk to early Internet engineers, they have a lot of crazy ideas. They’re the ones that coined magic to describe a certain kind of programming. Engineers I’ve spoken to love to talk about how they don’t really know how the Internet works. There’s a certain gasping at the mystery. I was interested in how one of the founders of Compaq, where the idea of the cloud originated, had a very heaven-driven Christian religion that somehow synched up with their engineering. Steve Jobs was this Zen practitioner. And then the progressive Jewish spirit in Mountain View with Google.

I have a complex religious history. Not a lot of women, I feel, tell their religious story, or their bildungsroman, how they came to believe what they believe. I wanted to tell a story that was memoir, that wasn’t sexual, about dating, about family trauma. I love reading those, but I wanted to write a different kind of story: How did I ultimately land on the Internet, and what did I bring to it?

You write that skepticism is good for the Internet in the same way it was good for punk rock. In the age of MFAs, art tends to suffer. We’re, I’m sure, entering an age of Internet-focused graduate degrees. And I would guess that your book might get assigned in those programs. [Laughs] You’re right. I start out talking about Greil Marcus, who wrote Lipstick Traces, who was really influential. We thought: You can finally write about pop and punk music! But, of course, that was already the era where he had codified it and named a way to talk about it.

It’s possible this book will have that effect of crushing that feeling of truancy, of rebellion, of “I’m doing something wrong” that I think is so exciting about the Internet. [But] I hope not!

This interview has been condensed and edited.