Joanna Walsh on Collective Internet Aesthetics

Joanna Walsh on Collective Internet Aesthetics

From Talking Writing by Martha Nichols, John Vogel, and Neva Talladen

February 4, 2026 · 56 min · Season 6 · Episode 8

About this episode

Joanna Walsh discusses her experiences and insights on internet culture and aesthetics with John Vogel.

Multidisciplinary writer Joanna Walsh sits down with TW creative director John Vogel to talk about Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters . When Joanna first started writing, lacking IRL community and instruction, she turned early Twitter to find likeminded others to share work with. It wasn’t until after she’d been working as an artist that the schooling aspect came into play, getting her PhD in Critical and Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and a MSCA postdoctoral fellowship at Maynooth University. Joanna also founded and ran two activist campaigns on Twitter—@read_women, a movement dedicated to equal treatment for women writers, and @no_entryarts to reshape ideas about age in the arts—and wrote twelve fiction and nonfiction books, including two co-written with self-coded AI. In this conversation, the two discuss aesthetics through history, funding structures for the arts, and how policy affects access to who’s able to practice art.

People in this episode

Host: John Vogel

Guest: Joanna Walsh

Topics covered

  • Internet culture
  • artistic community
  • aesthetics
  • funding structures
  • policy in the arts

Keywords

  • Joanna Walsh
  • John Vogel
  • internet culture
  • aesthetics
  • women writers
  • art funding
  • creative writing

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: University of East Anglia, Maynooth University, @read_women, @no_entryarts

Books & works: Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters

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