Girl Online: A User Manual

Critic Walsh (Vertigo) philosophizes about the complexities of online identities in this largely impenetrable collection. Weaving together nine “thought experiments” that muse on the interplay of technology and the self, Walsh takes a look at how “as screens became smaller, they crossed into private space.” In “Relativity,” she reflects on family ties and renders relationship dynamics as rules (“The second classification is sane/insane. 1. Insane people, they hit themselves. (aHa), (bHb)”). “Not Working” is an exploration of how screens have eroded the boundary between labor and leisure to the point where “paid and relational work” and “the online work of the self” happen simultaneously. The title essay is the strongest, juxtaposing Sex and the City with autofictional writing to critique the “First-Person Industrial Complex” of early blogging culture that “paid mostly women writers very little—and sometimes nothing at all—for everything they’d got.” Walsh’s musings can be fascinating, and she can turn a clever phrase (“I was temporarily a temporally flexible object”), but for the most part, she poses far more questions than she answers, and her thematic or argumentative through lines often get lost. The result is a work that seems to delight in its own inaccessibility. (May)