Lurking: How a Person Became a User

In a shockingly short amount of time, the internet has bound people around the world together & torn us apart & changed not just the way we communicate but who we are & 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 & technologies & in turn been churned by them. And yet, the internet is us & always has been.

In Lurking, Joanne McNeil digs deep & identifies the primary (if sometimes contradictory) concerns of people online: searching, safety, privacy, identity, community, anonymity, & 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 & visionaries & dynamic & powerful corporations, but there is a more profound, intimate story that hasn’t yet been told.

Long one of the most incisive, ferociously intelligent, & widely respected cultural critics online, McNeil here establishes a singular vision of who we are now, tells the stories of how we became us, & helps us start to figure out what we do now.