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What does it mean to live a life increasingly mediated by screens, platforms, algorithms, and machines? And why is being online so often treated as a condition from which we need to escape?

In Defense of Being-On-Line brings together writings by designer, artist, and cyberethnographer Ruby Thelot on technology and the strange social and cultural forms that have emerged around it.

Moving between social media, artificial intelligence, digital aesthetics, online communities, privacy, memes, friendship, and the devices through which we encounter them, Thelot examines the internet not as a world separate from everyday life, but as one of the places where contemporary life is now being made.

Across twenty-two essays, Thelot reflects on both intimate and systemic conditions: why young people are returning to iPods and single-purpose technologies; why humans form emotional attachments to robots; how Tumblr shaped a generation’s aesthetics and identities; what Instagram likes reveal about friendship and desire; how memes acquire political power; and what happens when content becomes less something we actively consume than an ambience surrounding everyday life.

Rather than simply celebrating or condemning technology, Thelot asks what our online behaviors reveal about us. His subjects are often ordinary digital experiences—following a near-stranger for years, receiving a notification, liking a story, scrolling a feed—but they become entry points into larger questions of attention, loneliness, legibility, community, power, and technological progress.

Written from within the network rather than at a distance from it, In Defense of Being-On-Line treats digital culture as culture: contradictory, funny, seductive, alienating, communal, but also profoundly human. The collection is both a critical account of our technological present and an argument for taking online life seriously as a consequential part of how we understand one another and ourselves.

Forthcoming from Draw Down Books