Growing Up On the Internet
A good deal of art about the internet is ironic and self-consciously superficial. Arend deGryuter’s Growing Up On the Internet project is not.
By collecting and displaying pleas for advice posted by teens and pre-teens to the Yahoo! Answers community, deGryuter presents an image of young adulthood that is touching and often sad. And unlike others who mine the site for comedic value and examples of human stupidity, deGryuter’s finds run the gamut from mundane to cute to distressing, but are very rarely outright funny. There does often exist in them, however, a certain uncanny distancing effect (it becomes somewhat difficult to take someone seriously when their spelling is so atrocious, for instance) which I think could be said to apply to a large portion of the internet in general, especially where emotion and naked sincerity is involved.
Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with irony and self-conscious superficiality (those things could also said to be intrinsic to the medium), but it’s definitely refreshing to see art that takes the internet seriously as a mediator of human emotions and as something that has by now become a ubiquitous part of growing up.
