breathedout: Reading in the bath (reading)
breathedout ([personal profile] breathedout) wrote 2019-05-14 04:12 pm (UTC)

No, although—logically it really wouldn't, because the historical memory of this book is EXTREMELY short. I kept going back and forth with myself about whether this was a feature, a bug, or just a neutral reality: the "then" to which Allen is comparing "now" is only, at MOST, 10-15 years ago, when the internet was already enough of an established reality that it's not a significant point of contrast.

In a way it's kind of cool to be able to observe a cultural shift just over that relatively tiny amount of time. In another way it feels like a very limited perspective (especially for a history-minded person like me) when nothing that happened before about 2005 even comes up. In a third way, I can see how Allen or her editors may have felt that a more historical perspective was outside the scope of this project, which is more of an activism travelogue/personal memoir, and already feels like it perhaps tries to cover too many people and places to do them all justice.

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