A French Writer Goes In Search of Lost Time, with a Little Help From Google
New York Review of Books, 2021 In the internet there is a fountain of youth into which at first you drunkenly plunge your face, and then in the dawn light you see your reflection, battered by the years, writes Maël Renouard. In Fragments of an Infinite Memory , he takes a step back to meditate on the effects of online browsing upon our lives.
Maël Renouard begins
Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life with the Internet with a memory about memory itself:
One day, as I was daydreaming on the boulevard Beaumarchais, I had the idea it came and went in a flash, almost in spite of myself of Googling to find out what I’d been up to and where I’d been two evenings before, at five o’clock, since I couldn’t remember on my own.
Graphic: Natalie Peeples
What did the internet used to be like? I’m not sure I remember. The conventional wisdom is that, even six or seven years ago, it was more fun and less serious. The dismissive claim that “the internet is not real life” seemed more true than not. Social media platforms were black holes for people’s free time, and that was the major knock. This all seems inconceivably naïve now that things have so severely deteriorated, now that the rapidity with which misinformation and society-altering conspiracy theories spread is so clear, and people spend more time logged on than ever.