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@article{182356,
        author = {Dr. Reena Salaria},
        title = {Like, Share, Disconnect: How A Visit from the Goon Squad Predicted Social Media’s Emotional Void},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2025},
        volume = {12},
        number = {2},
        pages = {1585-1589},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=182356},
        abstract = {Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) strikes a projecting light over the turbulence that technology brings into the fabric of human ties and identity. This paper studies how Egan's Pulitzer-winning novel, with its innovative structure and biting satire, may have anticipated those digital pathologies of the present day. The infamous PowerPoint chapter—that is, a clinical documentation of family dysfunction from the child’s point of view—foresees today’s world of performative self-branding on social media, where life itself is a brand. Egan’s almost-certainly-near-future view of concerts as being pause-friendly caters nicely to the abridged attention span that is the very algorithmic consumption of art and entertainment we see today.
Deeper still is the critique of technology as the bringer of both solace and isolation. The characters—Sasha, whose compulsive purloining screams of a cry for real connection; and Bennie, the music exec trapped in a fugue attempting to find his authenticity away from punk—embody the paradoxes of living in digitally mediated worlds. Egan's anticipation of the commodification of intimacy, through subplots of PR-manufactured “authenticity” and the marketing of personal trauma, has since come to pass in the influencer culture and viral content economies.
While diagnosing these digital maladies, Goon Squad offers fleeting moments of resistance, especially at Scotty's unrecorded river performance, which is a brief respite from technological mediation; this paper argues that Egan's work grows increasingly relevant in the 2020s as both a warning and a mirror to our tech-saturated present. The enduring power of the novel lies in articulating emotional losses of digital life before they became inescapable realities, thus making it a key text to understanding contemporary techno-social anxieties.},
        keywords = {Jennifer Egan, digital culture, social media, technology in literature, postmodern fiction, media ecology.},
        month = {July},
        }