ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter turns to Jarett Kobek’s satirical novel I Hate the Internet (2016), Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet (2011), and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) to assert how, for twenty-first-century readers, the novel importantly absorbs mixed media and, therefore, expresses how voices negotiate and mediate the terms of digital culture in a neoliberal society. In his own search for answers, the narrator of Kobek’s novel tells us himself that “all technology was the product of its creators’ spoken and unspoken ideologies,” affirming that “[t]he Internet was not a neutral environment dedicated to freedom of speech.” The novel, too, shares in this critique, affirming the argument made throughout Voices Gone Viral that the novel’s ideological reflection of media culture continues to make it a valuable social medium in the twenty-first century. When Lerner’s narrator, Adam, creates a novelistic assemblage of varying aesthetic experiences to underline the miscommunications at the core of the novel’s formation, he forms, in essence, what he formulates, enabling Lerner’s poet-novelist to create a self-reflexive dialogue from writer to reader. Having opened by looking at two novels that reinforce the ways in which viral voices foreground the prominence of aesthetic construction, the conclusion—and, by extension, the book—thus closes by leaving that construction open to the mutable networks of our global world.
