The internet looks like the present but the internet is (simultaneously) history. What looks like the history of the corporation is also the history of the amateur; the history of the hacker is also the history of the user; the history of the machine, the history of the human.
The internet-historical paradigm of amateur user/producer experience, the feminised confessional essay that has been called the 'First Person Industrial Complex' (Laura Bennett, 2015), relied on the precarity of its creators even as it opened up the world of online (and eventually offline) media to a wider and more diverse range of lives and experiences.
What I'd term Girl Rhetoric, an online mode familiar across platforms from blogs to Instagram to TikTok, originating in offline feminised styles from vaudeville to chicklit, has provided a methodology for noticing and delineating the 'Cruel Optimism' (Lauren Berlant) of the conditions of its production while paying lip service to the superficial demands of platformed appearance, and also providing surprising opportunities for re-framing, connection and agency.
This public event forms part of the CSNI Summer School 2023. Find out more.
Biography
Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of eleven books (several co-written with AI that she has coded), her publishers include Semiotext(e), Bloomsbury and Verso. She is the creator of the digital projects, seed-story.com and miss-communication.ie. Her work has been performed/exhibited at venues including IMMA, the ICA, the Whitworth and Sample Studios Cork. She is the 2020 Markievicz Awardee for Literature in Ireland and a UK Arts Foundation fellow. She is an arts activist, founding and running the Twitter campaign @read_women (2014-18), described by the New York Times as ‘a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers’ and @zinesinthedark, a lockdown zine exchange, supported by Arts Council England. She currently runs @noentry_arts (also on Twitter). She is a MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow at NUI Maynooth. She can be found at @badaude on Twitter, and at joannawalsh.ie.
