Sometimes I like to imagine who I’d be without the internet. A better person, for sure. A person who has read more novels, possibly written one, and spent considerably less time bickering with strangers. But what if there are other, more profound, ways in which going online has changed me?
That’s the question addressed by both Benji Wilson and Kathryn Jezer-Morton in these books, which look at how the commodifying grammar of the internet has insinuated itself deep into our personalities. One explores the way we behave as consumers, and the other examines the way we shape ourselves for consumption: together, they offer a depressing insight into the way we live now.
I’ll confess that, until I read Wilson’s Rate This Book, it never occurred to me to challenge the system of rating things out of five stars. What Wilson calls ‘the humble pointy glyph’ (he loves a baroque second mention) has always seemed to me, both as a reader of reviews and as a reviewer myself, the natural and ordinary way to measure quality. But Wilson, who covers TV for the Telegraph, as well as writing for Private Eye, has thought about things more deeply. The ratings system we are all accustomed to grew out of a specific moment in capitalism: it has its roots in the travel guides of the 18th century, with their imperative to provide at-a-glance information to time-pressed tourists.
