Do you know what “sponcon” is? How about an “ootd”? An “MUA”? Vocabulary is the first point of entry into Sophie White’s Unfiltered, the follow-on from her zeitgeisty debut novel, Filter This. We find ourselves once again among “#dubliningers”, who are “fresh for the gram” and “thirsty” for likes. If you have any idea what I’m talking about, you might be proof of the something the book hints at: how subtly and seamlessly social media has colonised our lives.
“Sponsored Content”, “Outfit of the Day” and “Make Up Artist” are the answers, if you were wondering. “#Dubliningers”? Dublin Instagrammers. But I’d wager that most people have at least some command of this strange new language.
Social media didn’t exist and then it was everything: a distraction, a means of income, an addiction. What does it mean to live under this filter? To perform our days for five-inch screens? To watch, judge, expect, deliver? As a columnist, journalist and podcaster, White is well-known for capturing “the now” in her distinctly voiced pieces. As a novelist, she captures a very particular moment in Irish life: the point at which we all began scrolling and never stopped.
As with Filter This, Unfiltered delves under the surface of the Irish influencer world, in particular the mummy blogger sphere. Motherhood is a lucrative business. Here we get a look at the bizarre ways it can be mined and manipulated for the screen, and the new pressures and judgments that come as a result.
Failing marriage
The chaotic Ali Jones and Queen of the Influencers Shelly Devine are once again centre stage. In Filter This, Ali faked a pregnancy to gain more Instagram followers. Now she finds herself pregnant for real, trying to sort out the mess she created and win back her ex, Sam.
Shelly, the picture of perfection on her online platform, is in fact struggling with a failing marriage, a burgeoning schedule and the strain of motherhood. With a second baby on the way and a sinister stalker infiltrating her life, the weight of everything is pressing down on her.
To some extent the book makes fun of internet people, with their shameless leveraging of just about anything for capital. Blogger “Holistic Hazel”, for example, takes the liberty of cancelling the term “self-care”, since it’s been “co-opted by the media” to sell bath candles. Then, in the same breath she coins the term “self-parenting” and offers a voucher code for bathing range “@lavenderlovlies”. But the book has more to offer than mockery.
Most of us can see through these people, but can we see them? As the title suggests, a central theme of the book is that there is always more beneath the surface. The seemingly vacuous Shelly is the first to peg that “there must be more to the story” in Ali’s case. Ali, of course, is struggling with the recent passing of her father. Even our stalker is portrayed from a sympathetic – or at least understanding – angle.
There’s an underlying fascination and an awareness of the power of this new culture. Unfiltered questions our hunger for “car crash” content and tries to balance the reasoning behind narcissistic and compulsive behaviour, the ethics of putting children on Instagram, and the real-life effects of internet takedowns.
Ludicrous events
At times the drama – a car chase, a kidnapping, a disastrous late-night outing with the ashes of Ali’s deceased father – pushes the story into farce. There are only so many ludicrous events a reader can handle. Though as social media manager Amy points out: “There’s no room for subtleties online.” Perhaps what reads like farce is really just the farce we’re living in. It’s surely a sign of our times that a storyline featuring a hoax festival and influencers stranded on an island, and a storyline about a blogger takedown podcast called “Under the Influence” feels too real rather than the opposite.
You can’t make this stuff up. You don’t need to. It’s clear that White has done her research (many an hour on the internet) and she plays on the very thing she critiques: combing life for “content”. But this “filtering” of life through fiction seems different to the “filtering” of life through Instagram. It’s mirrored in the book when Ali, our main character, writes and performs a play about her experience. For her, art brings catharsis, while the internet induces anxiety.
Ultimately, the main quality of Unfiltered is that it’s good fun. White has a knack of staying in the scene so the reader doesn’t feel like she’s reading at all. Anyone who enjoyed Filter This will feel satisfied with this follow-up. And those aching for a bit of light humour and distraction these days might count White’s novels as medicine.
