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A review by hetauuu
Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil
4.0
The internet is everywhere, and being a user is pretty much inevitable in today's modern society. In Lurking, Joanne McNeil details just how usership became a necessity, and how the internet grew from a fringe interest of the few to a daily commodity and later, a necessity as well.
Being born in 1998, I was not around for the early days of the internet, and thus was not familiar with the websites that McNeil talked about, such as Geocities and Friendster - I am too young to ever have used MySpace, too. However, the way McNeil talks about these communities resonated with my own experiences as a young user of the internet in the late 2000s, especially the community I sought, and often found, on online forums centered around a common interest. It is this sense of community that McNeil evokes when writing about the early online communities she used on these sites. The internet was not the cesspool it is now, not something people could access from their couch or bathtub or toilet with one quick swipe of a finger. But, as is McNeil's central thesis in Lurking, this has changed.
McNeil's narration of events is personal, yet not biased. She writes in a very balanced and matter-of-fact way about how the internet has grown in use and how online communities and social networking sites have changed and transformed over the short, jam-packed history of the internet. Yet even with her matter-of-fact tone, she weaves in personal encounters and experiences with these communities, bringing her own, and through that, everyone else's, personhood into being a user. These older online communities were also anonymous, something that in today's online landscape is hardly as common, with Facebook and Instagram profiles donning our government names and pictures. Maybe a part of the reason there was so much connection in these early communities is the anonymity, McNeil argues, and I would agree. Even in today's online landscape, where it is all the more common to publicize virtually anything with your name and face attached to it, people take to sites like Reddit for the most personal, deep secrets, using throwaway accounts to protect their identity. This kind of anonymity is a relic of the internet of the past - if the internet came to being just recently, being as hyper-public and open as it is now, it would be very difficult to imagine the possibility of anonymity.
A key concern for many users, myself included, is privacy - or the lack of it. McNeil does not sugarcoat the ways in which big corporations, such as Google, and advertisers, use, store, and manipulate the data they gather from us. Nothing in the internet seems private anymore, and McNeil makes the case that while privacy has always been an issue online, the scale at which our privacy is at stakes nowadays is unprecedented. However, McNeil acknowledges that it is not just the big corporations that benefit from the openness and lack of privacy, but users do, too. It is incredibly easy to find your cashier online based on name only, or to google your boss and find dirt on them, no matter how hard they've scrubbed their online profile neat and tidy. From the way Facebook exposes the browsing habits we assume are private, to the way advertisers gather up information on what we do, like, and dislike, to the way we ourselves lurk on people online, McNeil paints a varied picture of the kinds of privacy breaches that are all too commonplace. The title of the book, Lurking, perfectly encompasses all of this - whether it's you or Mark Zuckerberg, we are all lurking out here.
If you use the internet, you'd probably benefit a lot from reading this book. Which is to say, if you are reading this review right now, that means you use the internet, which means Joanne McNeil has a lot of interesting food for thought for you in this book.
Being born in 1998, I was not around for the early days of the internet, and thus was not familiar with the websites that McNeil talked about, such as Geocities and Friendster - I am too young to ever have used MySpace, too. However, the way McNeil talks about these communities resonated with my own experiences as a young user of the internet in the late 2000s, especially the community I sought, and often found, on online forums centered around a common interest. It is this sense of community that McNeil evokes when writing about the early online communities she used on these sites. The internet was not the cesspool it is now, not something people could access from their couch or bathtub or toilet with one quick swipe of a finger. But, as is McNeil's central thesis in Lurking, this has changed.
McNeil's narration of events is personal, yet not biased. She writes in a very balanced and matter-of-fact way about how the internet has grown in use and how online communities and social networking sites have changed and transformed over the short, jam-packed history of the internet. Yet even with her matter-of-fact tone, she weaves in personal encounters and experiences with these communities, bringing her own, and through that, everyone else's, personhood into being a user. These older online communities were also anonymous, something that in today's online landscape is hardly as common, with Facebook and Instagram profiles donning our government names and pictures. Maybe a part of the reason there was so much connection in these early communities is the anonymity, McNeil argues, and I would agree. Even in today's online landscape, where it is all the more common to publicize virtually anything with your name and face attached to it, people take to sites like Reddit for the most personal, deep secrets, using throwaway accounts to protect their identity. This kind of anonymity is a relic of the internet of the past - if the internet came to being just recently, being as hyper-public and open as it is now, it would be very difficult to imagine the possibility of anonymity.
A key concern for many users, myself included, is privacy - or the lack of it. McNeil does not sugarcoat the ways in which big corporations, such as Google, and advertisers, use, store, and manipulate the data they gather from us. Nothing in the internet seems private anymore, and McNeil makes the case that while privacy has always been an issue online, the scale at which our privacy is at stakes nowadays is unprecedented. However, McNeil acknowledges that it is not just the big corporations that benefit from the openness and lack of privacy, but users do, too. It is incredibly easy to find your cashier online based on name only, or to google your boss and find dirt on them, no matter how hard they've scrubbed their online profile neat and tidy. From the way Facebook exposes the browsing habits we assume are private, to the way advertisers gather up information on what we do, like, and dislike, to the way we ourselves lurk on people online, McNeil paints a varied picture of the kinds of privacy breaches that are all too commonplace. The title of the book, Lurking, perfectly encompasses all of this - whether it's you or Mark Zuckerberg, we are all lurking out here.
If you use the internet, you'd probably benefit a lot from reading this book. Which is to say, if you are reading this review right now, that means you use the internet, which means Joanne McNeil has a lot of interesting food for thought for you in this book.