Review: Everything I Need I Get from You provides a fangirl’s view of the web

Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It is a well-informed, witty, occasionally confessional account of fandom within the age of social media. Part journalism, phase historical past, and phase memoir, Kaitlyn Tiffany’s ebook stretches again to the times ahead of there even was once an web (she dredges up sneering press accounts of bobbysoxers and Beatlemania, together with the inevitable moments when journalists could not inform that teenagers have been pulling their legs) and revisits our on-line world’s first colonists (“Before most people were using the internet for anything, fans were using it for everything”). But her center of attention is on a contemporary fandom, one she participated in herself: the devotees of the boy band One Direction.

Here she unearths a microcosm of the whole lot else on-line: inscrutable in-jokes, networked energy, conspiracy theories, and the human impulse to forge an id and a group with individuals who proportion a zeal. This international might really feel acquainted even to readers who’ve by no means surprised a star of their lives. “There is no such thing as fan internet,” Tiffany concludes, “because fan internet is the internet.”