[LINK] The Toast interview with Sarah Jeong on how the Internet is garbage

[rfmcdonald]

The Toast's Nicole Chong has a great extended interview with journalist Sarah Jeong, talking about Jeong's new book examining the new realities and visible downsides of the Internet.

The Toast: If has always been mostly garbage, why did you write this book now? Do you think we’re better positioned in terms of either will or technology to take more of the garbage out?

Sarah Jeong: The book positions online harassment as part of a larger category of long-extant problems, but when it comes down to it, it’s still a book about online harassment. One of the things I wanted to do with the book was to hammer in how online harassment has been around forever — but I don’t think there would have been an audience for the book until fairly recently. There’s a lot more mainstream awareness of harassment and online misogyny in particular.

Why do you think that is? More media coverage, more survivors of online harassment speaking out?

100% media coverage. Part of that has to do with journalists being aggressively harassed — the journalists then turn around and use their platforms to show the world what is happening to them.

But that’s not the whole story. The Internet now includes a much broader swath of the entire population, which means that the old trite victim-blaming along the lines of “it’s just the Internet” doesn’t work so well. We now recognize the Internet as just another arena for our day-to-day lives, a place that’s no less real than the offline world. The Internet’s ubiquity also means that large-scale incidents of harassment become very large-scale, sucking in celebrities, journalists, even entire media organizations.