Again, the Girl Internet is not just for women, rather it is simply one framework with which I view the vast landscape of two subsets of internet culture that rarely, if ever, bump into each other, except for on Twitter during like, the Oscars or the Super Bowl.
I feel like this might be onto something? Maybe it’s way too reductive, or maybe it’s useful? The things that make the rounds and make up the cultural conversation in my internet and my husband’s internet are dramatically different. I have to remind myself that no, he didn’t get referred to that one article ten times this week, he hasn’t been reading the things I have been about AI or whatever, and I can’t assume he’s on the same page with what I’m talking about.
A challenge I find sometimes is doing a ton of reading about something, having my viewpoint shifted, and then encountering someone who hasn’t gotten the same “course,” if you will. I have no idea how to catch them up and no patience for doing it. And I know it’s from being on different parts of the internet.
This is why I probably shouldn’t ever try to write a nonfiction book. I don’t want to have to find sources for basic things and build up an argument from the most boring base. I cannot bring myself to have to find a source for, or write a sentence like: “It is not pleasant to be bored (Smith & Ellsworth, 1985).” (Tilburg & Igou, 2016). (Also that’s a boring and substanceless sentence, at least give us something more specific like, “People dislike feeling bored so much they change their behaviors and beliefs to counter boredom.” Which would set up the thesis of the paper, that people who are bored, and who more easily bore, express more politically radical opinions. But it would probably be harder to put a single citation after that.)
