In physical spaces, there’s a limited audience and time span for every performance. Selfhood buckles under the weight of this commercial importance. Thus, users are just as accountable to not solely be reactionary, but should spot the performative quality to the internet as a rhetorical space. Throughout, Tolentino emphasizes that the Internet, infinite with information, is able to be structured and manipulated to appear however the helmsman deems fit, including negatively. On one page you can find the term “Craigslist orgy” and on the next you’ll find Tolentino citing research from 1959 by sociologist Erving Goffman. This formula for how Tolentino presents information by creating an imaginary brainy, highbrow, Facebook using Frankenstein’s monster, is able to feel engaging without her arguments coming off as inaccessible if readers become too distanced from potentially unfamiliar literature. In “The I In The Internet,” the first essay featured in the collection, the reader is met with the opening line, “In the beginning the Internet seemed good.” Immediately, Tolentino casts a negative aura around the topic, but not without a bombardment of examples of iconic media mishaps in recent years, backed by-what is a surprising relief-academic theory. By concocting a compelling hybrid of the person essay and journalistic reportage, Tolentino gives readers what is, perhaps, the most powerful outcome that reading about the Internet-not just content spawned from it-can extend to us: assessing our own indulgence to be seduced by self-delusion. Instead, she thoughtfully-and humorously-offers critical inquiry into why digital spaces have the power to inflict our physical senses offline, without portraying the Internet as this nightmarish entity living under our beds. In nine new essays from her debut collection, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, Tolentino doesn’t altogether pour out confessionals strictly damning the Internet, nor does she pinpoint where the future of our screen worlds are going.
Years later, Tolentino now writes for The New Yorker while her previous employers include Jezebel and The Hairpin. Savoring her own autonomy to craft her own identity online however she’d like, she began using trailblazing website-hosting platforms like Expage and Angelfire to write about her early encounters with Beanie Baby webpages. Raised in Houston, Texas, Tolentino grew up finding solace in the surge of digital spaces taking over every teen and preteen’s life in the early 2000s.
Before Jia Tolentino was born, her parents moved from the Philippines to Canada and then from Canada to the USA.
And before the Internet, there was real life. Before there was Facebook, there was MySpace.
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