The Circle by Dave Eggers book review

Not so much review, but thoughts. Lots of thoughts.

I read this book for one of my classes this semester, a first year seminar that focuses on media, technology, and the Information Age. This is the first book we read, and it ties into our class perfectly -- plus my peers and I all really enjoyed it! I happen to be friends with a lot of people in my FYSem and we discuss the book a lot... ("Did you get to that part yet?" "It's so creepy!" "Goddamn Francis...") ...so much so that some of my friends who aren't in my FYSem have started making Circle references. ("The Circle must be completed.")

The Circle is a semi-dystopian fiction novel about a cutting-edge internet/tech company (called the Circle) and a young woman named Mae who rises through its ranks. It's a compelling read and it raises a lot of interesting questions, because the actions of the Circle aren't that far off from real things that are happening today.

The main basis of the Circle is one that's fairly appealing: TruYou, a system that consolidates all of a person's online activity into a single account that is operated from their real name. This includes social networking, bank accounts, emails, everything. No more anonymity means full accountability for online activities, and thus far more civil discourse on the internet. This isn't a terrible idea. I do like the option of anonymity online, but clearly there are dangers in that as well.

From this fairly reasonable start, the Circle's intentions escalated into a borderline totalitarian regime by the end. Whereas something to this extent could never happen, many real problems of today were illustrated through Mae's character development.

Mae started out pretty normal: she liked using social media, and loved everything the Circle stood for, but she wasn't excessive about it -- she had a life outside of it and enjoyed doing things by herself. Throughout the book, she becomes addicted to social media and brainwashed by the Circle.

Probably the most alarming part of the book comes with the declaration that Privacy Is Theft; that everyone is entitled to information, and if you don't share your life and experiences online, available to everyone, that is equivalent to theft.

There are points when she questions all this -- when she wonders if she really wants to know everything -- but the book ends with Mae fully on the side of the Circle, aggravated, even at the privacy within people's own minds. Shouldn't that information be free and available too?

This book is one of the creepiest I have ever read and it starts great discussions, especially among people my age who see small versions of this happening in our own lives. Mae's social media addiction is fostered by the Circle's insidious PartiRank system that measures all of their thousands of employee's participation. Mae begins to use their social media platforms after being reprimanded for falling so low in the PartiRank, but since the number is updated constantly, she becomes addicted to getting the number closer and closer to the top.

Toward the end of the book, Mae describes feeling a "tear" in her chest -- quite clearly, depression -- and when she does, she'll go on a social media binge in order to temporarily relieve the pain. This is certainly something that happens to people, and a lot of apps and social media platforms encourage this kind of addiction and dependency with leaderboards and other competitive factors.

The major turning point in the book comes when Mae is somewhat coerced into going "transparent"; this is something originally designed for politicians, but then made popular among regular citizens, where a camera is constantly worn around a person's neck. The way Mae's behavior is changed is fascinating. She monitors herself, knowing she's always in the public eye, to eat healthier, drink less, work more -- all fairly positive changes, granted. But she also, unhealthily, begins to live for the attention. She can't even zone out for a minute without her "watchers" asking her what's wrong. All of her behavior is centered around what they will think of her.

Mae, who used to love to go kayaking alone to clear her head, is now always accompanied by thousands or even millions, of watchers. This is a striking contrast.

Mae is definitely a pretty weak character, in that she is easily influenced. But I think she's a realistic character for that same reason. It's worth noting that for all our mistrust of the government, we let private corporations have immense influence over us.

My favorite aspect of The Circle, though, has to do with the concept of being an individual. All of Mae's higher-ups say that they like her for who she is, and they want to know more about her, and she's unique and awesome... But they don't respect her choice to do activities alone, go home to see her family, or not use social media. Everything is so customized, but people are essentially just data-sets: customers. The only unique traits the Circle wants to know about are ones that can be monetized.

In a pretty on-the-nose metaphor, not the only one in the book (that transparent shark though), large red boxes, kind of resembling the book's cover image, are kept underground the campus, each one to store the data collected for each "transparent" person. So, yes, the Circle wants to know about all your preferences, but just so they can contain you in a neat little box. Anyone working outside their system is seen as a threat.

Linguistics is super fun

One of my classes this semester is intro to Linguistics and I kinda thought it would be my favorite class because it sounded absolutely fascinating and guess what I was right. I legitimately save my assignments for this class so I have something to treat myself to after writing papers or reading textbooks for other classes. And this isn't just me -- another friend of mine who's in the class loves it too.

So let me explain myself.

The current unit we're on is Syntax and this primarily involves the syntactic components or constituents of a sentence or phrase. The way this is visually shown is with a really awesome tree like these:

Every sentence is essentially a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP), but those two parts can be made up of lots of other parts.

What really gets interesting is mapping out structurally ambiguous sentences such as these:

Click on picture to enlarge.

Both these sentences ("Bob said she seemed cute yesterday" and "I saw the man with the telescope") can have two meanings depending on how the constituents are arranged. So a really cool double tree is made to show both meanings.

So this has been: I'm getting way too excited about my Linguistics homework and I wanted to share that with you.

The two ways to depict a diverse set of characters

I think that media representation is pretty important but it's only worth something when it's done right. I've noticed that there are basically two ways to depict diversity in fiction. I'm calling the two ways Ineffectual Diversity and Realistic Diversity.

Ineffectual Diversity is characterized as surface-level diversity: simply showing a variety of races, genders, sexual orientations, etc. but not letting these things affect the characters in any way other than their appearance. This can be accomplished by developing your characters' personalities and roles in the story first, then randomly assigning gender, race, sexual orientation and any others qualities you wish to. I've done this before, and find it's a good way to account for any inherent prejudices you may have as a writer.

But this is not representative of the real world, because, as I discussed in this post, people are affected by things like race and gender -- duh. Ineffectual Diversity is instead what it would be like in an ideal world where race and gender don't carry stereotypes and don't change the way people are treated. This method is probably best for creating minor characters.

For major characters, you probably want to go with Realistic Diversity. This approach addresses issues of face, gender, sexual orientation etc. through the characters. This leads to a more difficult, and more risky, work of fiction but ultimately one more effective and progressive. Orange Is The New Black is a perfect example of realistic representation.

The trouble with striving for realism in the field of representation is that there are many instances where a certain profession, time or place being presented on-screen would be dominated by white men in real life. But this ceases to be an excuse much of time. For instance, I find it hard to believe that the creators of stories about magic, superheroes and the future can't imagine that same world with a slightly less homogenous population. 

The majority of works of fiction do not strive to be representations of real life so this is no excuse for neglecting to include people of all races, genders, orientations, etc. 

Either mode of representation, either ineffectual or realistic, is preferable to the current state of exclusion or only including a "token minority." Both can and should be used to integrate all kinds of people into popular fiction.