Lurking: How a Person Became a User

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

The cultural space of the internet continually surprises, betrays, enriches, befuddles us. We have churned through platforms and technologies and in turn been churned by them. In Lurking, Joanne McNeil probes the concerns of users—searching, safety, privacy, identity, community, anonymity, and visibility—in an intimate history of the web in which we are all, increasingly, ensnared.