Good Girl, Bad Blood

The internet and its vast network of social media sites offer tremendous potential to transmit and receive information. Pip is quick to grasp and exploit social media as a means to conduct her criminal investigations. She can leverage thousands of podcast listeners to provide important clues. However, for all social media’s power to do good, the very expanse of its reach poses a downside. Everybody can know everything, even some facts that are best kept hidden. Pip herself admits, “The whole story was there, contained within those blue lines. From the start of Pip’s project to the very end: every lie, every secret. Even some of her own” (3).

Once she opens a new podcast season to find Jamie, she reminds Connor, “Remember what you asked of me? When I release this, it will go out to hundreds of thousands of people” (75). Hundreds of thousands of listeners are a formidable army of potential witnesses. Unfortunately, not every listener is trustworthy. Pip tells the Reynolds family:

‘I agree that releasing the investigation on my podcast is the fastest way to get media attention for Jamie’s disappearance. […] But with that, you have to accept that your private lives will be laid bare. Nothing will be off limits, and that can be hard to deal with.’ Pip knew that better than most. The anonymous death and rape threats still came in weekly, comments and tweets calling her an ugly, hateful bitch (61).

Social media functions like a runaway train. It possesses power, but the engineer has lost the capacity to control that power. Pip often finds herself uncovering unpleasant information that she would prefer to suppress for personal reasons. However, her pursuit of truth prevents her from filtering out the bad and keeping the good. She says:

More emails had come in with photos from the memorial attached, and the notifications from her announcement had reached into the thousands. Pip had just muted them now that the trolls had found them. I killed Jamie Reynolds, said one of the gray blank profile pictures. Another: Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? (109).

The ambivalent nature of social media is echoed in Pip’s own ambivalence about pursuing truth. Some facts are better suppressed. Some information is not worth knowing. While Pip can direct her investigation, she has no power to direct the internet. The investigation will take on a grim life of its own in the hands of her podcast listeners. Charlie could never have found and killed Stanley if not for Pip’s podcast.