One of Esquire's Best Books to Elevate Your Reading List in 2020,
, and a OneZero Best Tech Book of 2020. Named one of the 100 Notable
books of 2020 by the End of the World Review.
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.