LURKING

How a Person Became a User

By Joanne McNeil

In her first book, “Lurking,” Joanne McNeil charts the history of the internet through the experiences of the users. These are not necessarily the same as people. Conflating the two, McNeil explains, “hides the ‘existence of two classes of people — developers and users,’” as the artist Olia Lialina has put it.

The difference: Developers build and shape the online experiences that users run around in like rats in a maze. Users make their way through the vast web trying to fulfill certain essential desires. McNeil separates these behaviors — searching, activism at the expense of safety, privacy, identity, community, anonymity and visibility — into chapters, each discussing the platforms and websites that serve them. McNeil maps out the history of the web, from the first bulletin boards, to the early days of blogging, to the emergence of social platforms like Friendster and eventually to the online world we live in today, dominated by tech giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Some users are deeply nostalgic for certain platforms of the past. “Most surprising is how fondness for Myspace has grown as time passes,” McNeil writes. “It has come to represent a particular moment of freedom and drama online, especially to those too young to remember it.” She quotes the musician Kyunchi, who compares Myspace to Woodstock. It was a special, unique place and if you weren’t there, you missed it.

McNeil uses language that is incisive yet poetic to capture thoughtful insights about the internet, like the insidiousness of these platforms’ monetization schemes: “The problem with Instagram lies in how user identity entwines with commerce.” Nor does she mince words when taking on one behemoth in particular. “I hate it,” she writes. “The company is one of the biggest mistakes in modern history, a digital cesspool that, while calamitous when it fails, is at its most dangerous when it works as intended. Facebook is an ant farm of humanity.”