Lurking

A concise but wide-ranging personal history of the internet from - for the first time - the point of view of the user.

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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 us online and what keeps us there 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, powerful corporations, but there is a more profound, intimate story that hasn't been told.