A Modern Kind of Loneliness
A conversation about Bo Burnham’s Welcome To The Internet
Discussed: Inside, social media, the pandemic, nostalgia, the Wendy’s Twitter account
Gabe: This, or maybe “That Funny Feeling” is probably the piece of Inside I’ve gone back to the most.
Arielle: I love both songs and they really do speak to the tonal breadth of Inside. Burnham pulls you into this fascinating conversation about how the Internet has shifted our cultural attitudes and also impacted each of us in big and small ways.
G: Inside was the first Burnham work I watched in its entirety. I watched at your recommendation, too! The middle of 2021 was the perfect time for me to see it, I think. Not only for the pandemic, but also the ongoing state of media and my feelings about working in news.
A: I had to double check when Inside first came out because it feels like such an essential text about the Internet, even though it’s relatively recent.
G: Definitely. Something I really connected with in this song was the idea of “content” as this catch-all term, which groups everything together and gives it all the same weight and value. And it does seem like in the last year or so, there’s been more pushback to that idea, or maybe more recognition that not everything online is the same, or is meant to generate the same reaction.
A: Yes, the sort of flattening of everything online is very much at the heart of “Welcome to the Internet” which I think is connected to our experience scrolling and just having nonstop information thrown at you. But the fact that instead of pushing back, we kind of accept it with this term “content” becoming more and more ubiquitous. It’s disturbing because it shows that the Internet is not just something that happens to us. It’s something we are also, in big and small ways, constructing.
G: Something I struggle with when I think about pushing back on the idea of “content” is the line between warranted frustration and resistance to inevitable change. Thinking about an essay or news article I write, I want to think it’s not “content,” and that it shouldn’t be compared to, say, the posts of an account that just reshares memes. But, those meme accounts are really popular, and sometimes I wonder why bother resisting it if this is what more people want?
A: Yes, I share those concerns. Sometimes I feel like writing culture articles for online audiences has reshaped my brain! I realize that when I think of an argument now, I often automatically go to a clever attention grabbing headline in order to articulate what I really want to say. And I think that approach can have its genuine merits, but I also love reading pieces that don’t conform to that model. Taking a break from nonfiction work to write fiction (which is a completely offline writing experience for me) made me wonder about what we are missing with the insistence on speed and concision in online dialogue. I am also someone who is constantly online haha! I like being involved in conversations and seeing what people are saying and have gotten used to seeing a serious article next to a meme, so I don’t know…
G: Same, yeah. I find that often I’ll be on a bus and I start looking at my phone to see what a couple friends are up to and, by the time I’m at my destination, I might be halfway through a ProPublica article and I can’t really trace the path from one to the other. That shift in tone is something I’ve noticed a lot more lately, too. I will finish reading a very serious book or watching an emotionally draining movie, then put on the silliest comedy podcast and go do the dishes or something and not really take the time to breathe or process like I probably should. I just shift my brain into a completely different mode a million times a day. I wonder if it’s having some kind of effect.
A: When I started watching Reels and TikTok videos, I started to realize how much we are primed to kind of quickly consume one video and then move to the next. A lot of people first watched Inside that way too.
G: I have to say, I got a little bit nostalgic preparing for this, and thinking about the idea of watching *a* video on YouTube, with a link that people can navigate to and watch and not necessarily swipe or scroll into and out of. It’s an experience I realize I don’t have online anymore—being sent a link to watch something in a web browser that’s not just an extremely short clip that I forget about later because I’ve sat through like ten videos the algorithm sent me after (though YouTube recommends what to watch next, it’s not as instant as on Instagram).
A: That’s a great point. Sometimes I wonder if it’s just nostalgia I’m experiencing when I pine for an older digital experience, or if the Internet itself has just gotten progressively more concerning over time.
G: I grapple with this all the time. I think it can be both—we can examine that nostalgia and come to a conclusion that the experience used to be better. I think Burnham gets at that a bit in the middle of the song, with the description of what the Internet used to be. I often wonder who the “you” is that he’s addressing in that section is.
A: Many of my undergrad students feel it’s a specific call to Gen Z, a passing of the baton from one generation to the next. I think it’s also interesting how fast video content ages. Inside isn’t an “older” film, but because of the speed we consume videos, “Welcome to the Internet” feels “old” rather than current. I think part of that is the warped sense of time in the pandemic, but, “Welcome to the Internet” feels extremely topical, especially with some of the changes on Twitter ( do I have to call it X? I guess it’s X).
G: I have a hard time calling it X. The website is still Twitter.com. Maybe that’s my own nostalgia guiding me, though. I have found myself in the last year feeling very strange talking to people about how fun it used to be to be on that platform. Or the joys of being online in general!
A: Yes, one of the reasons I hesitate to delete my account is that I feel the connections I’ve made through Twitter are so genuine. This connects to your thoughts on “content”—I feel like something happened when we shifted from “friending” to “following.” That there once was a sense that genuine connection could occur through social media. I don’t know that anyone feels that way any more. Social media is understood as performance.
G: That’s a good point. It seems like there’s an acceptance that someone is a different person on different platforms. From my seat in the news business, I remember a lot of conversations in 2009 or so about whether to even have a branded Twitter account for a place where I was working, or whether it should only be a real human being posting and sharing. And from there, it was this type “professionalization,” which was almost a standardization for how to approach the platforms.
A: I remember when companies first started using Facebook and my first thought was, how weird is that? But now I think it’s considered weird to not have a “brand” and just be a person on the Internet.
G: Yeah, and there was that wave of corporate brands being “edgy” on Twitter, which now I look back on as the beginning of the end. Wendy’s dunking on people on Twitter felt bad at the time, and looking back, it feels almost dystopian now (to use an overused term).
A: That’s such a great point. It felt surreal. Now it’s just normal. So much of Inside is about this modern experience of loneliness that feels deeply connected to being online all the time. I wonder if the future is offline, but I think we’re all struggling with how to quit this version of the Internet which is clearly causing so much harm.
G: “Loneliness” is such a good description of it. I think it was those edgy brand posts that broke my sense of hope or of wonder for the Internet. After that, I went back to thinking that all accounts should only be a real person, and that scheduling posts was a bad idea, because it was essentially talking to no one. And from that point, it felt really empty online.
A: Yeah. I feel like when you and I first started to talk about Together, Alone, a large part of our conversation was going back to that exciting experience of the Internet where people connected with each other. I think that still happens in some online spaces, but, as a whole, we aren’t talking with each other at all.
G: Definitely. When we were in the early stages, I remember noticing how few people I used to enjoy following were actively posting to Twitter and thinking “well where will we all go?” And at the same time, I was packing up books for a move, and I realized I had a lot of collections of pieces from sites that used to be must-reads, or books by writers who I found through their writing online. And I had this nostalgia for that era of having a few sites or people that I always read or went back to.
A: Something that makes me hopeful is knowing that we aren’t alone–that many people are hungering for genuine connection in digital spaces.That’s one of the things I appreciate about Inside, that in a darkly funny way, it insists that we are together and that, because of that, we can work to find our way outside again. On the one hand, it’s this very personal look at agoraphobia and depression, but it’s also genuinely about all of us. How are we going to get outside of this tiny terrible world?