Love, Floppy Disks & Other Stuff the Internet Killed

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About the book

Combining anecdotes from her own childhood with the voices of male and female rappers, anonymous posts on confessional apps like Yik Yak, Secret, Whisper, and demographic data regarding what’s wrong with millennials, Natalie Shields composes a portrait of a generation that feels a lot but doesn’t know what to do with these feelings.

Shields, born in Seattle in 1993, belongs to a generation of young adults who grew up in tandem with the Internet. Millennials—conditioned participants in virtual romance, fantasy computer game worlds, and robot companions—are supposed to be overstimulated, hypermediated, and unable to connect.

For them, is love—like the floppy disk—a symbol of something now defunct? Is love now a cipher—something that used to exist but has become pure abstraction? Or is it actually the opposite? Is the idea of love so omnipresent in millennials’ cultural discourse that they have monumentalized it? What is it about love that the Internet killed?

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Meet The Author

Natalie Shields

Natalie Shields is a 2015 graduate of RISD, a member of the design collective Henry Blank, and a designer at Doubleday & Cartwright.

Read a sample of Love, Floppy Disks & Other Stuff the Internet Killed

A sample of Love, Floppy Disks & Other Stuff the Internet Killed

Selected sample pages. The original collage artwork is followed by its readable text. The recurring printed labels “CHAPTER TITLE 1.”, “PAGE #” and “BOOK TITLE” are part of the approved source design.

Sample page 1

title page

We have had some great times this year, a lot of fun group projects together, and a lot more experiences I’ll always remember, have a great summer,

Sample page 2

Contents-page typography with a skull warning-sign doodle and handwritten message.

WTF? · OMFG

your a slut! But I ♡ you.

Sample page 3

pants on fire

Sample page 4

Large numbered text and a smaller school memoir paragraph.

My high school was originally built out of a cozy, 110-year-old house; the formerly residential neighborhood containing it had been swallowed by downtown. After recent remodels, the school had become a Frankenstein collage of Craftsman architecture and skyscraper.

01 I am a millennial: born between the birth of AIDS and 9/11, give or take. They call us the global generation. We are known for our entitlement and narcissism. Some say it’s because we’re the first generation where every kid gets a trophy just for showing up.

Sample page 5

Halftone yearbook portrait with a black bar drawn across the eyes and a handwritten carpool message.

Yo, good times in Carpool! —CL

Sample page 6

Large continuation text paired with a smaller school memoir paragraph.

Others think it’s because social media allows us to post every time we fart or have a sandwich, for all the world to see. But it seems that our one defining trait is a numbness to the world, an indifference to suffering.

Before the school got its face-lift, it was a mess. On two separate occasions, a ceiling tile fell on my head. The first time, I thought the girl sitting next to me had hit me over the head with her backpack. She thought I had done the same thing to her; in a moment of confusion, we glared at each other. I told the other kids, when they asked what happened, that the ceiling tile fell on my head and that she had hit me with her backpack anyway—makes for a better story. The second time, I accepted that the place was simply falling apart on top of me.

Sample page 7

Photograph of two people outdoors, crossed by a band of digital distortion.

Sample page 8

Large numbered quotation overlaid with a handwritten message.

10 Objectified female bodies: those images are everywhere, in advertising, in movies, in TV programs... The only way in which men are allowed to make a connection in the culture, with women, is through sexuality, and it’s only through their [men’s] own desire.

I love you!

Hip-hop culture is not separate from the rest of American culture.