The way the portal wrote: Datafication and subjectivity in Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This

Abstract

The so-called ‘internet novel’ has been predominantly analysed in relation to social media, fragmented online discourse, and identity formation in the virtual realm. While these themes persist across a range of internet novels, from speculative fiction to recent literary prose that mimics the internet itself, less attention has been given to the genre’s engagement with the production of increasing quantities of personal data online, otherwise known as datafication. This article examines Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021) in the context of datafication, language, and the effect of the internet on human subjectivity. The article takes up Deborah Lupton’s concept of ‘data selves’ and Legacy Russell’s theorisation of ‘glitch’ to consider the aesthetic, affective, bodily, and subjective critique of datafication in Lockwood’s novel. It argues that contemporary literary fiction is not only a site for representing and imagining the implications of datafication, but that it can also function as a self-enclosed intelligent system that is indispensable for understanding how the internet is fundamentally changing the way we speak, write, and think.