I enjoyed Break the Internet written by Olivia Yallop and published by Scribe and its insights into the behind the scenes of the huge industry of social media and influencers that is growing and how people are becoming brands, with influencer training camps to teach you how to sell yourself. There are a generation of kids who want to be influencers and they know how to do it because they have already seen the influencers before them do it. The part where Yallop speaks to an agent was very interesting. Tumblr was a thread that ran through Break the Internet, which made me nostalgic. She mentions the anonymity that the platform had (fuck knows who we were talking to on there) but, in my opinion, that was a plus for Tumblr because you could be whoever you wanted to be but felt you couldn’t irl. It didn’t feel like a performance, as I feel it can do now and nobody was worried about the algorithm. Other subjects in Break the Internet include gossip sites, award dos for influencers, junk lord videos and TikTok. In Chapter 8 Logging Off, reading about the pandemic and the effects lockdown had on our screen time gave me a racing heart, I almost had an anxiety attack. Content, content, content.

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