Book Review: Ctrl Alt Delete

Emma Gannon is part of that strange new generation who make a living from the internet, whose blogging about the everyday has led to writing and journalism and speaking engagements and who applauds the entrepreneurial spirit of vloggers and other creator/influencer types.

She’s only a couple of years younger than me but the world she describes varies from familiar to terrifyingly alien. In the first two of her series of essays about her relationship with the internet, she depicts the stresses of MSN conversations and selecting the perfect profile picture – not just for strangers but for people at school, for friends-of-friends, for people you know – as well as the thoroughly unpleasant experience of having private messages to a boy shared publicly. And all this before she turns fifteen.

Gannon is perfectly pitched as the person to illustrate how earlier online communications paved the way for the tangled and problematic mess of social media today (even though she is very much a fan of it) – just on the cusp of that point where it was the norm for online identities to be linked to your real-world ones, rather than being completely separate. (I was a teenager in fandom circles, where it was your secret world. When Bebo started up and normal people had online profiles, it was weird.)

As she grows up ‘with’ various different social networks, she emphasises the power there is in staying on top of new trends and new apps – something which sounds completely exhausting, but seems to be what she loves. She also addresses the trickiness of discussing issues online, especially feminism. It’s more breezy than thoughtful, perhaps in part because she’s more used to blogging, but as a quick read about internet culture for young people, it works.