When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.
Editor's note:
Dave Eggers' book, The Circle, has an enterprising premise and then goes nowhere and is a big disappointment. The hypothesis is that the social media companies like Google and Facebook are taking over the world. Mae Holland, a young woman in her early 20s, gets a job at the Circle as a "Customer Experience" representative. Slowly she becomes sucked in to the cult like beliefs of the corporate culture disagreed with by her former boyfriend, Mercer, and her parents. It seems frighteningly sick and all too real as one observes the addictive, preoccupation that people now have with the digital media. Like lab rats addicted to the pellet of food dispensed with the push of the button we wait with baited breath for the next text, the next email, the "like" or "don't like" on our post. If the response isn't quick enough, we easily become upset, discombobulated, angry and resentful with the person who didn't respond as quickly as we wanted.
Eggers plays with this scenario of an addicted young woman whose life becomes consumed with virtual reality to the extent that she grows increasingly alienated and withdrawn from her real life. The book finally ends having gone no where with Mae's boyfriend dead, her parents estranged, her best friend in a coma, and her committed as strongly as ever to the circle.
Increasingly, it is hard to imagine life without the internet and our modern gadgets. Have they improved the quality of human life? I think, in the balance, the answer is "yes". Are there adverse side affects? The answer, again, is clearly "yes". Perhaps the future requires that we create a balance and an awareness that we need to keep our addiction and dependence on social media in check.
In the counseling room, issues about the social media come up all the time, and can be quite troubling from cyber bullying, to cyber affairs, to vicious calumny and personal attacks. Parents are increasingly using the banning of gadgets such as cell phones, computers, tablets, video gaming machines as punishments. "Grounding" has taken on a new meaning from geographical restriction to digital communication restriction.
The Circle is an interesting novel that raises awareness about the important issue of how digital communication has taken over our lives. The treatment of the topic however is superficial and not well resolved. I am sure future novels will deal with this topic of digital communication and hopefully it will be more extensively and thoughtfully developed.
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