Joanne McNeil doesn't know how to feel about the internet, and that’s okay. Lurking: How a Person Became a User is a history of the best and worst of the social web, from the newsgroups of the 1980s to the 21st century mega-platforms we know so well. The book reads like the information superhighway it describes: she cruises past Usenet, AOL, Friendster, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Wikipedia to our present day. Along the way, there is talk of profiles and profits, searching and sharing, community and copyrights, permanence and peer production.
Along with this birds' eye view of tech history — which provides much-needed context for Zoomers like me — McNeil recounts her own experiences online, from being a teenage girl using pseudonyms to talk sex on message boards to getting harassed as an adult via Instagram DM. At times, she zooms out of the ground-level user experience to take a swing at the tech giants for turning people into users: commodifying our complex identities into discrete, sellable data points. While these asides occasionally feel disconnected from the book's central narrative, they mirror my own mixed feelings about creating community under Zuckerberg's calculating eye.
Like Gretchen McCulloch in her book Because Internet, McNeil successfully makes the obvious intriguing, the implicit explicit, and reframes the internet as a culture worth serious study like any other. Like Sarah Frier in No Filter (read my review here), McNeil is deft at tracing and comparing the design of a social platform to its human/user impact — such as how Friendster profiles facilitated self-obsessed curation, or how Wikipedia's page structure seeded a maintenance-oriented culture. And like any good sociologist, McNeil ends with a dream for the internet as social infrastructure: a library, a public park, a commons.
Some readers might feel disoriented by Lurking's frequent tonal shifts: some passages read nostalgically, others professorially, and yet others steeped in exasperation. But I found McNeil's ambivalence and cautious hope refreshing. Though I might be too young to remember an internet before the gold rush, that was truly private or profit-free, Lurking most closely parallels my own feelings about the web today — the source of some of my best friends and greatest fears, of constant distractions and major epiphanies — just a place full of people, searching, still.
(apr 21, 2021)
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