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Lurking: How a Person Became a User
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22/99
Critics' Rating Index
15/99
Readers' Rating Index
86/99
Scholars' Citation Index
95/99
Volume of Reviews
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About This Book
A concise but wide-ranging personal history of the internet from—for the first time—the point of view of the user In a shockingly short amount of time, the internet has bound people around the world together and torn us apart and changed not just the way we communicate but who we are and who we can be. It has created a new, unprecedented cultural space that we are all a part of—even if we don't participate, that is how we participate—but by which we're continually surprised, betrayed, enriched, befuddled. We have churned through platforms and technologies and in turn been churned by them. And yet, the internet is us and always has been. In Lurking, Joanne McNeil digs deep and identifies the primary (if sometimes contradictory) concerns of people online: searching, safety, privacy, identity, community, anonymity, and visibility. She charts what it is that brought people online and what keeps us here even as the social equations of digital life—what we're made to trade, knowingly or otherwise, for the benefits of the internet—have shifted radically beneath us. It is a story we are accustomed to hearing as tales of entrepreneurs and visionaries and dynamic and powerful corporations, but there is a more profound, intimate story that hasn't yet been told. Long one of the most incisive, ferociously intelligent, and widely respected cultural critics online, McNeil here establishes a singular vision of who we are now, tells the stories of how we became us, and helps us start to figure out what we do now.
Reviews
"By charting the evolution of many complex and divergent online communities, McNeil shows that lurking is not a passive activity but a productive one."
"Sharp, broad-ranging techno-criticism that merits attention."
"Yet though McNeil's account is largely elegiac in tone, she guards against the lure of nostalgia."
"McNeil's argument isn't wrong, necessarily, but her narrative logic can seem random."
"speaks to the powerlessness we users can sometimes feel on these platforms, how difficult it can be to stay in control ..."
"And it's all written without a trace of the Good-Old-Days nostalgia so often found in histories of this kind."
"It's...easy to assume that the promise was always hollow and that we were dupes from the beginning for logging in, for making our first Google search, for creating that first profile page."
"history of the internet articulating the sensations of being online that users everywhere will recognize."
"strikes an impressive balance of insider tech-talk and universal human connection, though true techies will have an obvious leg up with the nuances of internet-specific examples ..."
"Her account is impressively and even dizzyingly far-reaching, to the point that its many tidbits of information sometimes blur together."
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