5 Pivotal Social Media Novels
By now, it’s hard to deny that life spent on our smartphones can be mentally and physically unhealthy, inherently performative, and potentially harmful in several ways. Social media, in particular, is adept at giving us the impression that we’re in control of its content – the illicit thrill of liking somebody’s old photo on their feed, picking out imperfections in a photo posted, imagining others looking at your own feed, and so on. And yes, we understand the irony of having shared this on social media.
But these contemporary and fascinating novels capture the shifting tensions between voyeurism, exhibitionism and the speculations of possession our devices induce in us. From portraying social media as the villain to nuanced takes on our interaction with it, they show us that perhaps the internet and the written word don’t always have to be in stark opposition.
Sympathy- Olivia Sudjic (2017)
In many ways, this is considered the “first Instagram novel”. The narrator gets obsessed with a Japanese writer teaching at Columbia University and stalks every aspect of her life. Sudjic is deft at taking us down the rabbit hole along with her. How many of us have been in a position where we’ve met somebody interesting and immediately mined their entire digital presence– their favourite book, coffee, the grant they received four years ago, their astrological sign, past romantic partners, and members of their family? This novel doesn’t just point to the now, but captures it in all its breathless, contradictory glory. It’s a searing commentary on how the algorithms we use to define ourselves might be using us instead, and on modern human connection.
No One Is Talking About This- Patricia Lockwood (2021)
Shortlisted for the Booker, Patricia’s Lockwood debut novel is about a writer who comes to be celebrated for her good tweets; she is invited to cities all over the world to speak about “the new communication, the new slipstream of information”. When we meet her, the tweet in question, “Can a dog be twins?”has “recently reached the stage of penetration where teenagers posted the cry-face emoji at her.” She refers to the Internet as “the portal” and wallows in the curated irony and blitheness of the web. The protagonist is considered to have ‘brain worms’, a fallout of spending an unhealthy amount of time on Twitter – an affliction we’re all far too familiar with. The book was fittingly written primarily in Lockwood’s Notes app, and captures the contemporary in a way few have managed.
A Touch of Jen- Beth Morgan (2021)
In this arresting debut novel by Beth Morgan, a young couple’s Instagram crush on a former co-worker spirals out of control, as their entire relationship begins to revolve around her outfits, captions, mantras and life, rendered in technicolor on their screens. They get invited to spend a weekend at her wealthy boyfriend’s Hamptons home, where the class resentment, desire and violence underpinning their obsession rise to the surface. Small occurrences escalate into outright horror and the reader tumbles into an alternate reality that’s shaped by the couple’s most deviant and disturbing fantasies. A Touch Of Jen is part social satire, part body horror, and incessantly entertaining, investigating the hidden motivations behind our carefully curated selves.
Fake Accounts- Lauren Oyler (2021)
The debut novel of critic Lauren Oyler tells the story of an unnamed narrator debating breaking up with her boyfriend after she finds out that he runs a secret Instagram account pushing inane but vitriolic conspiracy theories. She consequently moves to Berlin and lies about herself to every person she meets, including a series of internet dates. The central preoccupation of this novel is the performative nature of social media, which Oyler addresses with a breezy yet caustic self-awareness.
We Had To Remove This Post- Hannah Bervoets (2022)
During Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, he said he would loosen the platform’s content moderation policy, sparking serious debate. What counts as harmful content, who gets to decide, and why? Hannah Bervoets’ seventh novel, and the first to be translated to English from Dutch, focuses on the nasty impact of content moderation on the people who are responsible for reviewing hundreds of problematic posts, videos, comments and more – some disturbing, others downright violent. The novel takes the form of a letter addressed to the lawyer who has invited the narrator to join legal action against a tech subsidiary. The novel also views iffy relationships through the same prism as online content – where context and perspective is key– to paint a picture of the unseen labour that goes into making the Internet a safer place.