In seven essays, Alice Bolin turns her gaze to the myriad ways femininity is remixed and reconstructed by the pop culture of the computer age. The unlikely, often insidious forces that drive our popular obsessions are cataloged, contextualized, and questioned in a kaleidoscopic style imitating the internet itself.
While at times digressive, Culture Creep is also a hypnotic read precisely because Bolin is a magpie writer who fixates on shiny objects and pursues her fascinations. In that sense, nostalgia serves as radar, as much as a distraction ... The essays in this book are exhaustively researched, loaded with citations of academic articles and social theory, in addition to some truly fascinating insights from Animal Crossing fan forums. But it’s hard to shake the sense that Bolin included some of these secondary sources to compensate for a concern that Y2K artifacts and early-2000s media are not topics serious enough to constitute an essay collection.
Often these wanderings make it difficult for the reader to identify a central gathering point for Bolin’s musings, though she manages to hit at some sharp truths ... The author’s most meaningful observations concern the 'post-feminist apocalypse' American women now find ourselves trapped in ...
Where these essays deal in more global subjects, holding the reader at arm’s length, the essay Real Time invites us in as she indulges in some of the more frivolous joys of the computer age—and it’s more compelling, and persuasive, as a result. Her writing shines as she describes her six-week obsession with Animal Crossing ... Culture Creep may struggle to pin down a single thesis—but that’s not to say Bolin doesn’t have a point. The problem might be that she has too many.
At times, Bolin’s meta-commentary about essays as they unfold can be distracting. Culture Creep succeeds in questioning the direction of popular culture in a time of upheaval and in prompting readers to ask what cults they have willingly joined.
