Unwitting precursors of the Internet Age
I'd be interested to hear about books or works of art people on this sub have read or experienced which while *not* being ostensibly about the internet nevertheless seem to provide a set of formal conceits suitable for writing about the internet.
For example I'd cite three authors, all of whom predate the internet, who utilise formal innovations which shape perception/cognition in a way that to me seems 'internetic' (not trying to coin that as some cool term, just being lazy with my syntax).
Nicholas Mosley in Impossible Objects
- different registers and multiple extended metaphors cross the pretty mundane first-person narrative in a very structural, rhythmic way, making it feel like someone walking through a collapsing and reassembling multiverse without commenting on it as being odd. Feels apt for multimedia mundanity we all live in rn -- phones, screens, adverts, tvs, billboards, memes, etc. etc.
Claude Simon, Conducting Bodies
- use of mise en abyme, a sense of everything somehow being reproduced in everything else, endless repeatability, and narrative proceeding via an associative and sometimes paranomasic logic, reminiscent of side-scrolling, of memes which can morph into new memes via vague associations. Simon's style is also heavily imagistic and focused on bodies in space. Visuality is foregrounded today, for obvious reasons; and bodil experience is increasingly becoming an object of interest to the extent it also seems to be getting deprioritised, at least for the office worker population who are also terminally online in their 'leisure' hours.
Antonio Lobo Antunes, Fado Alexandrino
-use of multiple POVs which bleed into one another, plus multiple times within each character's lives existing at the same time. A polyphonic novel of richly metaphorical voices where everything seems to be happening at once.
I'd say on the level of prose John Trefry's fusion of forensic scientific analysis of perception and movement, combined with stream of consciousness prose, feels very apt for an age in which we can pause, zoom in, search up details about, annotate, and repeat the tiniest gestures and motions.
Anyone got anything similar?
I'd also cite Disco Elysium and Peter Greenaway's Tulse Luper Suitcases as two works which are for me formalistically 'internet-like' without necessarily being 'about' the internet.
Other works: Sometimes a Great Notion, Kesey; Genoa, Paul Metcalf; Micrographia, Robert Hooke
EDIT: I'm looking for Formal Techniques. For techniques and formal devices which are internet-like, rather than works whose subject matter anticipates the internet.