In an era of great techno-anxiety, the premise of Virginia Heffernan’s Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art is deeply appealing: the internet, increasingly the architecture and infrastructure of our everyday lives, is “a massive and collaborative work of realist art.” This is a fresh perspective on today’s technological landscape, which has yielded rehabilitation centers for internet addiction, digital-detox vacations like Camp Grounded, a Wikipedia entry on the dubious composite “technostress,” and a galaxy of well-documented moral-panic narratives (as old as the web itself, from Time’s infamous 1995 “cyberporn” cover story to Mark Bauerlein’s contentious recession-era polemic, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future) about the ways technology has gnawed into community, romance, labor, and selfhood.

MAGIC AND LOSS: THE INTERNET AS ART by Virginia Heffernan Simon & Schuster, 272 pp., $26.00

Heffernan’s view of the internet as an artwork—with its suggestion that time spent online is creative, for participant and spectator alike—is not TED Talk hypothesizing, nor is it freshman-dorm-room, accidental-inhale paranoia. The project is in keeping with a growing movement to bridge the division between technology and the arts, seen in San Francisco’s Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (a center for “creative coding”), New York City’s School for Poetic Computation (motto: “more poetry, less demo”), articles about online subcultures and their values, and even in new programming textbooks such as Nick Montfort’s Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities. But Heffernan takes her argument a step further. In framing the internet as a work of art, she is not just claiming technology for the humanities. She is offering redemption.

Heffernan aims to do for online life what Susan Sontag, Marshall McLuhan, Lester Bangs, and Pauline Kael did for the fields of photography, media, music, and film. She wants to give the internet a poetics—a vocabulary for appreciating its texture, its tones. Drawing on literary theory and cultural criticism, Heffernan seeks to “make sense of the Internet’s glorious illusion: that the Internet is life.” The web, she argues, is a masterpiece on par with “the pyramid, the aqueduct, the highway, the novel… the radio, the realist painting, the abstract painting,” etcetera. Just as each of these inventions changed the way we relate to one another and the way we express our humanity, the internet too is a social force, a locus of new cultural values. Like any social triumph—especially one in a phase of rapid development—it bears critical inquiry and investigation.

In Heffernan’s understanding, the internet is a unique kind of artwork, even as it contains recognizable art forms with analog roots (video, photography, literature). It’s participatory and user-generated. It might be called a hyperreal artwork “closer to a game than to a deception.” She explains: “Our proxies in this game are our avatars: the sum total of… artifacts of text, image, and sound that we add to the Internet and attach to our various handles.” So the artwork is both game and player: the scaffolding is in place, but it’s our digital selves that give the piece color, contours, feeling. This work-in-progress relies on a feedback loop. It improves with human engagement, and engages more humans as it improves. Slowly but persistently, the enterprise shifts.

When is the Internet art? And when is it just, well, life?

One of the biggest changes the internet has introduced is the way people read: compulsively, promiscuously, unwittingly. Heffernan gives the online-induced inability to stop reading the name “hyperlexia,” borrowing a term from child psychology. Texts are everywhere, she argues, from Amazon reviews to Facebook posts to Tinder messages. Heffernan finds beauty, value, and narrative in the words fostered by the immediacy and intimacy of social platforms. She is particularly defensive of Twitter, arguing that it has allowed poetry to flourish. “Digitizing written language—in short communiqués, as in texts or tweets… or in long form, as in lengthy Facebook debates or Amazon’s ebooks—even restores something to written language that print technology had cost it,” she writes. “When changed from chunky, chewy, smelly matter (think used bookstores) to the photons that enliven our screens, written language becomes purer somehow, and more itself.”