Lurking

This book is a good companion to Brotopia, which opens up deeper and more critical discussions regarding the context and struggles surrounding the Internet and the growth of the big platforms of today.

Still very US-centric, with the occasional mentions of tragedy elsewhere like the Myanmar genocide. The feeling I get from the flow of the book is that it sometimes reads like a sociology essay, sometimes a free form op-ed, a bit of memoir, with elements of tweet-deep shower-thoughts. It keeps the text interesting and not so monotonous as one would expect from a historian/critic, but it also made me feel like the book didn't really have a direction or a central thesis. It just is, like digital content is allowed to.

I consumed this in audio-book form, narrated by the author. I'd say the near monotone reading sort of matches the insider-but-amateur angle of the content, but fatigue made me listen in shorter bits than what I usually do. Differently from most non-fiction out there, if attention disperses and one misses a paragraph of this book there's a decent chance you actually lost something.

I listened to this book as an audiobook narrated by the author. I first learned about it in 2020 and watched "Why Trust a Corporation to do a Library's Job". I think this made me have a different impression of what to expect from the book. Some of it was information I was familiar with and some of it was new. It's also quite personal as others have noted. I was really surprised to learn about a side of Ello that didn't make the same impression on me when I was a teenager who didn't know about the drama that was happening around it. I think it'd be a book that would get along well with some friends, but I'm not sure what the person I'd recommend it to would be exactly. Perhaps something along the lines of someone who'd be interested in books like Blockchain Chicken Farm. It's the type of thing I feel like not enough of my peers know about.

Search, Anonymity, Visibility, Sharing, Clash, Community, Accountability – these are the chapter titles and ideas around which Joanne McNeil takes an essayistic, historical and socio-tech dive into thinking about the platforms so many of us love-hate to use every day. From message boards to Myspace (oh, the nostalgic feelz!) to today's Google and Facebook this book reflects what is actually meant by those terms and shows how that often is something different depending on if look at it from a user's or the platform's perspective. On Google Seach for example you find thoughts like "A request like 'I am 60 and alone…' is not to nobody, and it is not to Google, either. The results are ours, that humanity is ours. Google commodified the act of finding it inside one another."

Lurking is a great read that does what I love about essayistic writing: it combines personal thoughts or experience and emotions with theoretical thinking and science. Towards the end the frustration about Facebook gets a bit ranty, but let him who hasn't been there cast...

The books ends on a positive tone, on what a better internet for the people should look like and I agree: "Librarians are what the internet is aching for."