The book I Hate the Internet by Jarett Kobek is a fictional story that follows the story of Adeline who is around 45 and takes place in California in 2013. The story talks about Adeline’s early career in the comic business, making a comic call Trill in 1996. She and her best friend, Jeremy created this comic, but because of the time they decided to use pseudonyms to try and protect themselves.
Adeline is not a fan of the internet and throughout the story she makes sure to touch on that. While giving a speech to a class on Internet privacy she said, “I don’t use Twitter or Facebook. What does send yours truly into a tizzy is when people won’t admit that they’re just stealing other people’s shit?” This shows how Adeline was not supportive of the Internet or social media because of how easily someone can download her work for free when she worked hard for it
While Adeline was giving her speech to this class, the most unforgivable sin was committed. She didn’t release that one of the students were recording her and ended up posting the video to YouTube for everyone to see. This event caused a lot of problems for Adeline, including getting death threats from people. She didn’t really know how to reply, since she didn’t have social media. Adeline eventually download Twitter and began to use to reply to people.
This book was not the best in my opinion. Kobek made me feel very dumb at points because of the language that he was using. For example, when he would talk about someone’s race he would say “There’s no eumelanin in the basal stratum of their epidermis.” I just really don’t understand why he couldn’t say Caucasian or African American. Another thing was how he felt the need to explain everything he talked about. The basketball explanation annoyed me the most, because I feel like the basics are very understandable. The reviews for this book on Amazon are out of 73 customers, 55% gave it either four or five star and the other 45% gave it one through three stars. I do not recommend this book.
Literature & the Internet 