About the book: Remember all those ingrained habits, cherished ideas, beloved objects, and stubborn preferences from the pre-Internet age? They are gone.
To some of those things we can say good riddance. But many we miss terribly. Whatever our emotional response to this departed realm, we are faced with the fact that nearly every aspect of modern life now takes place in filtered, isolated corners of cyberspace - a space that has slowly subsumed our physical habitats, replacing or transforming the office, our local library, a favourite bar, the movie theater, and the coffee shop where people met one another’s gaze from across the room. Even as we have gained the ability to gather without leaving our house, many of the fundamentally human experiences that have sustained us have disappeared.
In one hundred glimpses of that pre-Internet world, Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review, presents a captivating record, enlivened with illustrations, of the world before cyberspace - from voicemails to blind dates to punctuation to civility. There are the small postcards, the blessings of an adolescence largely spared of documentation, the Rolodex, and the genuine surprises at high school reunions. But there are larger repercussions, weaker memories, the inability to entertain oneself, and the utter demolition of privacy.
100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet (2021) is at once an evocative swan song for a disappearing era and, perhaps, a guide to reclaiming just a little bit more of the world IRL.
100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet is named one of the ten best books of the year by Chicago Tribune and the Dallas Morning News.
About the author: Pamela Paul is the editor of The New York Times Book Review and oversees books coverage at The Times. She also hosts the weekly Book Review podcast. She is the author of seven books, How to Raise a Reader, co-authored with Maria Russo, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues, By the Book, Parenting, Inc., Pornified, The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony and Rectangle Time. Prior to joining the Times, Paul was a contributor to Time magazine and The Economist, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Vogue. She and her family live in New York.
Sounds interesting. I remember the time before the internet. And while we also gained a lot, I can probably think of many good things we lost to it.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree. I grew up without the internet and it was the best time. I don't think anyone's childhood should include it until they're much older but it seems like no one can get away from it nowadays.
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