Girl Online A User Guide

What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl. Girl Online is an (anti)user manifesto exploring the terms and conditions that women must negotiate to appear on the internet. On commercial platforms, vloggers, bloggers and influencers are offered a devil’s bargain: visibility on the condition they present as eternally youthful, cute, and responsibility-free, paying for their online presence with ‘accounts’ of personal experience. In this way, a user is what is used. How does one woman negotiate the (cyber)space between her identities as worker, mother, artist, and fluid, commodified online persona? How does her hidden care work, as well as professional and emotional labour, play out online? Are the platforms offered by social media a trap or an opportunity for survival, creativity, and resistance? In this arresting personal narrative, Joanna Walsh constructs a philosophical investigation into the constraints and possibilities of the technological self, exploring thoughts on technology, identity, and labour. Taking in selfies, social media, celebrity, and Cyberfeminism, Girl Online is written in a shimmering array of online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary to tweets and lyric prose. Navigating its way via Sex and the City, Plato’s Symposium, and the rise of the first persona industrial complex, it is a user manual for women as the users and used of the net.