Menu
Maybe someday
28
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
21/100Critics
34/100Scholars
Author:
Joanne McNeil
Publisher:
MCD
Date:
February 25, 2020
McNeil examines her own personal history using the internet and connects it to others', charting what it is that brought people online and what keeps us here even as the social equations of digital lifeâwhat we're made to trade, knowingly or otherwise, for the benefits of the internetâhave shifted radically beneath us.
What The Reviewers Say
Lurking is far-reaching and ferociously smart, told from the hearts and minds of users rather than the profit and loss statements of tech conglomerates. In centering her research on the user experience of an ever-changing internet rather than the theatrics and myth-making of Big Tech, McNeil weaves a people’s history of the internet, making for a humane, big-hearted narrative of how the internet has changed—and how it changed us.
McNeil uses language that is incisive yet poetic to capture thoughtful insights about the internet.
... amazing.
By charting the evolution of many complex and divergent online communities, McNeil shows that lurking is not a passive activity but a productive one. Lurking isn't organized by the linear, deterministic framework that characterizes many accounts of how the Internet came to be. Rather, the history McNeil presents is idiosyncratic and contradictory.
