Lurking

How a Person Became a User

By: Joanne McNeil

Narrated by: Joanne McNeil

This program is read by the author.

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.

A Macmillan Audio production from MCD

©2020 Joanne McNeil (P)2020 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

Esquire Magazine Best Books of the Year, 2020

Very interesting content horrible narration

This is the kind of content that takes a while for you to get the gang of and warm up to.
The author narrates and, well... it should be exciting when an author reads their book but, this is not the case. Her reading is pretty bad, slow and monotone so, it is PAINFUL to continue. I’m proud of myself for going through almost NINE hours of this.
The content is good. It’s the story of the internet and how we became users. How evil Facebook is and how awful we are as humans. Really diving into the lack of democracy in platforms, lack of privacy and no freedom.
Very interesting. It would have been way better if someone with better tone and diction would have done this one.