In The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, Justin E. H. Smith calls on the reader to consider the internet as neither exceptional nor new. Smith provides a new argument about what the internet as a sociotechnical system is “ontologically” and “genealogically” (12). Differently from media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun—who posits in her book Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media that networks make crisis ordinary—Smith asserts that the internet constitutes a crisis of incomparable dimensions: it is “addictive and . . . incompatible with our freedom”; life and culture shaped by algorithms are “warped and impoverished” (9) and “aggressively undemocratic”; the internet is “a universal surveillance device” (10) and “anti-human” (11). Despite its flaws, Smith contends that there is a worthwhile project in the ambitions of the internet.
Smith's book's concerns are the crisis of attention; forms of interconnection, or what Smith calls...
