North by night book summary6/5/2023 ![]() ![]() YouTube allows us to come and go as we please, a fantasy existence real life simply does not afford: In the physical world, we must sleep, we must wake, and so on. But the vibrant, grotesque, illuminating, and overwhelming comment sections that accompany many YouTube videos also provide the social interaction that is the stuff of human existence. The medium satiates our need to be passive viewers of other experiences, or to use the language of internet message boards, to lurk. The reader leaves " Magic and Loss" with a sense that Heffernan views YouTube as the platform most capable of delivering us the apotheosis of internet art. ![]() ![]() The internet, then, gives us a thing we can necessarily never get in the real world of linear time: a true second chance.Īnd it is this "read" logic of the internet that makes the net a reality - an art - all its own. All of the internet (except, as Heffernan notes, in, "its most secure, theoretical, and self-destroying corners, and mostly even there") can be read and remade. "Read" code can be re-worked, re-written, re-structured. "Write" code happens as we experience our lives - forward forever, never to be re-worked. Heffernan, who often references her childhood dabbling with computer code nerdery while growing up near Dartmouth College in the 1980s, gives us a layperson's breakdown of the difference between code that is "read" or "write." In many ways this is the crux of the book's argument. This also, however, makes obvious how forcefully the internet has come into our lives, not because some technologists in Silicon Valley made it so but because the whole of the internet's structure is a self-fulfilling reality. While reading this passage, readers of a certain age - call it anything between 22 and 32 - are likely to get a pang of nostalgia for that seemingly Wild West period a decade ago when the purchase of ringtones was something people not only did but did a lot. We hear about the comically tragic reality that in YouTube's earliest days the fastest growing part of the music business was the sale of ringtones sponsored in old cartel-like fashion by the quickly dying music labels. In Heffernan's book we are introduced to the profound ways that internet culture, or rather the simple presence of high-speed, cheap internet access, has altered our understanding of text, music, video, and photography. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. ![]()
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