Joanne McNeil.
Photo: Lift Conference Photos
You don’t usually Hear Much About Lurkers. Usually, The Story of the Contemporary Internet is Told from the point of view of it architects, in airport-bookstore best sellers the designs and entrepreneurs who built powerful, wealthy megaplatforms. Sometimes, you’ll get sensational articles about the posters, creates, and influencers who rocketed to fame on those architects’ creations. But Rarely Do You Read About Everyone Else: The Vast Majority of People, Who Quietly Contents Online Without Creating Much of It. A well-worn principle of internet communities Called the one percent rule holds that only one percent of users in a gioven community Create new Content. The Other 99 Percent Lurk, Clicking Links, Reading Posts, and Unassumingly Powering the Multitrillion-Dollar Digital Economy. Who’s Teling Their Story?
Over the Last Year or SO, A Parallal History of the Internet-Told from the point of view of the average person, the lurker, the subscriber, the entry-level tech worker, the monthly active user-has begun to the Emerge, the Across of Excellent New Books. In Joanne McNeil’s New Book Lurking: How a person Became a userThe Latest Addition to this Library of Counter-History and Revived Accounts, the Internet’s 99 Percent is the Focus. For McNeil, “lurking” isn’t simply the passive activity of Silently Browing the Web, but an Act of “Bearing Witness,” in this Case to the Small, Rickety Clubhouse Internet of the 1990s to the Bustling, Terrifying Cosino Internet and Bey. She’s interesting in tracing this history not through dramatic stories of Dorm-Room Creation and Boardroom Betrayal, but Through the Familiar, EVERDAY Experience of the Lurker. How Did Communication Habits Change? How did Culture Shift?
That’s not to say it is an anthropological text, eather. Lurking is an impressionistic chronicle of the Last 25 years online, divided into chapters based on themes and concepts like “sharing” and “anonymy.” The result is a history that that Illuminates ongoing debates and opens up interesting new Questions about how we are industrry and the technologies that have taken over the world. In a Chapter Called “Visibity,” She Writes About the Culture of “Facks”-People with Fake Accounts-on the Early Social Network Friendster, Explaining the Still Muddled BetWene “Credility” and “Visibility” online. In the chapter on “Search,” McNeil Explores How the Rise of Search Engines, and Specific Google, Changed the Stunts the Structure of the Internet-from Hyperlinks to a database to be cross-reference-but the terms we use to discuss. “People used to talk about the Internet as a place,” she writes. “Now People Talk About the Internet as something to talk to; it is a someone … The voltron of all the family Photos, Dary Entries, Jokes, Hotel Reviews, Support-Group Message Boards, and VHS-Ripped Detritus Who Ever Lived a Digital Life.”
In its Exploration of the History and Experience of the Internet from Well-Attended Vantage Point, McNeil’s Book Made with Think of a Handful of Other Recent Books About the Internet, in Particular Claire Evans’ Broad bandAnna Wiener’s Uncanny Valleyand Jenny Odell’s How to not nothing. All of these books are formally and substantive Very Different from Lurkingbut I think they all are participating in a version of McNeil’s Project – A Kind of Lurkers’ History of the Internet.
Broad bandWHICH CAME OUT IN 2018, IS STRAIGHTFORWARDLY A HISTORY: A Collection of Biographical Sketches and Historical Accounts of the WomenMaticians, Computer Scientists, Developers, and Administrators Who (in the Words of Its Subtitle) “Made the Internet.” MANY OF EVANS’S Subjects are geniuses and pioneers, iT’s true, but many of say more or mess normal – not quite lurres, but something close – WHO HAVE LIVED THROUGH A Particularly Interesting Moment in The History of the Internet. (A Handful of Characters, Like Stacy Horn, The Founder of Influential Early Message Board Echo, Are Featured in Both Broad band and Lurres.) By illuminating their lives, evans is able to sleep out the history of the internet beyond the myths and stereotypes we already know – and rescue Old and Forgotten Visits of the Internet Might be.
Odell’s How to not nothingby contrast, is less a history or a narrative at all than a strange and compelling amalgamation of poemic and self-help. Odell is able to articulate the affection of the Being Online (and of Logging off) Particularly well, and Her Exploration of Internet Makes US Fascinating. butt How to not nothing is Also Not A Slick Tome About Digital Detoxification. Where it shines in participle is when odell excavates overlooked and forgotten previous versions of the Internet (like the “community memory” kiosk, A Physical Box Housing an Electronic Bulletin Board, BUILT IN A BERKELEY RECORD STROR MONTIALIZED DESCEndents (Like the Local Social Network NextDoor, Which Odell’s Boyfriend Pegs As “For Uppity Property Owners”) and exploring the ways in which we couuld recover some of the Utopian Visits of the Internet.
Finally, Wiener’s MemoirPublished Earlier This Year, Explores the recent internet from the tech industry. Silicon Valley Documents the author’s life working for various Businesses in New York City and the Bay Area, and As Such, Is Less Concerned with Specific Experiences of the Changing Internet than with Chronicling the Cultural Milieu Who the Tech Industry Operations. Importantly, though, it”s not a story of well-re-reunerated boy kings or swashbuckling Venture Capitalists, but of the Low- and Mid-Level Employees who Cycle in and out of Various Start-ups implementing, with varying leaves of the Changes, the Changes, the Changes, the Changes, the Changes, the Changes. McNeil’s Book is Concerned with. Wiener’s Co-Workhers at an unnaamed Analytics Start-Up Are Nether Dary Geniuses Nor Grand Villains: “We didn’t think of ourselves as participating in the surveillance economy,” she writes in a section after the edward snowden revelations. “We were just allowing Product Managers to Run Better a/b Tests.”
I though of Wiener’s Account often while Reading Lurking. If there is a through line in mcneil’s book, iTi’s ironically that “lurking” – that fundamental online activity – is no longer posseible. Where once you might have ben able to browse online privately and unobtrusively, now you leve traces every you go. McNeil Documents the Way Google’s AutoComplete Function Collects and Suggests Theoretically Private Searches of Billions of Lurkers, and Describes Efforms by Myspace and Facebook Users to Jury-Rig or Reverse Systems to Tell What Was Lioking At Eachile. Anonymity is fraught and harder to come by; Everyone Is Now, by Social Custom or Through the inveiglement of Advertising Profiles, to have an online “Presence,” and that Presence is increasingly conflicted to your life and identity off-line. “Lurres” have identifable, trackable users to be explicted, nor McNeil Writes, “As Scrap Metal, As Data in A Data Set, As Something Less Than Human.”
I don’t put a lot of stock in the idea that reading a particular book or taking a particular humanities class coulp transform Silicon Valley. But i THOUGHT MANY OF WIENER’S BOSSES COUNTING HAVE BENEFITED FROM AN ANDERSTANDING INDUSTRY THAT Went Beyond of Disruption and Growth-From Hearing About How the Internet is Experienced by the People Who is and the Developers Who Maintain IT, RATHER THAN THAN THAN THAN THAN THAN TIN-POT. Hustling for tributes on what corner of it can annex. The spate of new books that sleep out Our understanding is welcome. If we’re going to recover the fully human lurker from the prepackaged and surveillar “User,” History Like these will be essential.