I'm not sure if, say, in two years we are back in the world. Are we using the internet the same way? Are we using mobile apps the same way? Are we thinking of the internet as maybe it's better off in the house?
SPEAKER_00Hello and welcome to Tech Won's Save Us, a podcast that absolutely loved to see Lily Wikowski attack Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump on Twitter. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm speaking to Joanne McNeil. Joanne is the author of Lurking, How a Person Became a User. And she's also written for a number of different publications, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Wired, and The Baffler. She writes a column at Filmmaker magazine called Speculations, and you can follow her on Twitter at J O M C I think you're really going to like our conversation today where we talk about how online platforms affect us as users and how our experience online has evolved since the beginning of the internet until today. Before we get into the interview, if you want to support the show, you can do so by leaving a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, or by sharing the show on your social media, or directly to friends and colleagues if you think they'll like it. And if you want to support the work that I put into this show, you can also go to patreon.com slash ParisMarks and support us through there. Thanks so much and enjoy the interview. Joanne McNeil, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.
SPEAKER_01Hi, Paris.
SPEAKER_00It's great to speak with you today. So you have this new book called Lurking, where you kind of talk about how our experience online has evolved over the course of, I guess, a couple or a few decades now, as the internet has slowly evolved and you know kind of taken a greater role in our lives as we've come to use it more and more, and even the way that we form communities on it has changed. So I was hoping that you could start by kind of explaining a bit how our experience online has changed and maybe also how that has kind of changed us and how we interact with each other online.
SPEAKER_01So one of the things I wanted to tackle with this book is the idea that the internet was so great and now it's awful. And so, you know, a lot of the things that we are familiar with today, like surveillance and harassment, that was present even from the very beginning. Um, and in this book, I start in 1990, um, with the beginnings of the web, certain kinds of um early online communities, um, and including AOL, which is very commercial program. I mean a very, very um corporate enterprise. And uh so I wanted to contrast that that element of coming to the internet as a place where you're interacting with strangers under a screen name, and that there was a freedom and creativity that came from it and how that transitioned over time as we start using our real names or photos became more um identifiable in our online experience. And uh there are still aspects of that early internet available to us today, and just as those not so great aspects of the internet were happening back then.
SPEAKER_00Do you think that because I guess the way that generally we use the internet has changed, as you said in the past, like there was AOL, and you also describe how and even I remember from my earlier days using the internet, like there were some things that you talked about that I I wasn't really online for and I didn't really see, but like I remember in my earlier um experiences online, it was like all uh like discussion boards and like in kind of like group chats, and then like it slowly kind of merged into these larger platforms, like MySpace is the first one that I really remember using, but more on the tail end of it when Facebook was already start starting to kind of eat into it. So obviously I have this really specific experience of it, and as you say, you talked about how nostalgia is one of the things that you wanted to kind of address in this book. And I feel like I certainly feel some nostalgia for like that period. Um, but it as you say, it's not necessarily the case that everything was so great back then, too, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, but I think some of that nostalgia is, and I certainly feel it, is the kind of dreamy quality of those early encounters, the ways that people would communicate with each other. I mean, when I look back at some early Usenet posts, I'm just floored by how beautifully written they were. Um, and that's an aspect of language, use of language, that hasn't really been appreciated. Um, I also get into the book like elements that happened around um around the time of the Great Recession when uh you had the literary critics who are like, well, everything on the internet is dumb and it's all trashy people on the internet. So why would we pay attention to the internet? Um, but I think in those early years, you didn't have that sense of needing to define you had the gatekeeping aspects that came forth. I think that that kind of ultra gatekeeping aspects, um, I associate that with kind of the late ops, whereas people like me would sneak in and write books. Right. Which I did. Um, and so but that that quality of the the texts are are sometimes so beautiful. And I I really would um encourage anyone curious to to kind of look at some of those old Usenet posts, just like do a random search for some time in like '94 or something and look at like the ways that people spoke to each other. There was something really touching and and vulnerable about that, um, which could be because they were these these users would have been um quite divorced from their real world experiences, their real world encounters. One of the online communities I do talk about is quite the opposite. It's called Echo. They they were very much um integrating the real world and having offline uh encounters as well, because they were all basically based in New York. So that's part of the reason that community has thrived for many, many years. Like I want to say that there's still a lot of them are still really closely in touch. But then there are those very ephemeral interactions that came through just because you were trying something out and not forming, not really defining yourself in your participation in the community. It was more just like fluttering in and fluttering out. Um, and that freedom, that's something that I would like to be able to uh see more of these days. I mean, like I said, there are really interesting projects um if you look hard enough, but I I think that that element of of really wanting to write something beautiful and share that with utter strangers, I don't I don't see as much of that as there was maybe in the 90s.
SPEAKER_00I even thought about it like when there was this shift kind of that that I noticed at least, like in the way that I saw people around me kind of using the internet and and the people in the communities that I used to frequent using the internet at that kind of time of of uh Facebook's real real dominance and kind of colonization of the internet. Um where it went from like these discussion boards and uh communities into uh like Facebook groups and and things like that, and it just wasn't it was never the same, right? And I feel like uh there are probably some uh Facebook groups that thrive and that do really well, but uh it's a completely different way of uh forming a community and having an interaction between people, right? Um so what was really that that you kind of see this this change that happened when we go from those uh smaller communities to these kind of uh globe-spanning platforms with millions, if not billions, of users. Like how does that kind of change the way that we interact with each other online? But like I guess also how this kind of online experience works.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely, because back then there weren't really like buttons or ways to go viral or the whole aspects of of broadcasting your posts. I mean, you could be popular online, but it wasn't the same as you know, having that one quippy post that will get thousand retweets in 30 minutes, and just and also the the kind of financial incentives to have that one quippy post that maybe that means you get a job at BuzzFeed or something. I mean, it's just like there are rewards available to people if you if you do have that visibility online these days. And I don't want to be critical of people who do benefit from that because I can see why. And I have a little bit of a mixed feelings about it just because I know that the internet has certainly shaped my career in terms of making a writing career possible for me. I I don't see a future for me writing essays or books at any other period in time. Like there, I just would not be able to be a writer without the internet. But that sense of like being tied to an online persona, having the pressure to constantly get that that engagement, um, that that's very different from group community interactions on a forum. That's all like everybody's kind of in on the joke, and you can have peers and you can have a community as opposed to you're the star, you're the micro celebrity or the actual celebrity. So I think that's like one of the the tricky things happening. And then also I just I I mean, like I say in the book, I'm not really I I haven't been on Facebook in ages. I have number of problems with it. Um, it's really just because A, I'm lucky enough to not need to use Facebook, B, it just makes me feel bad. I just like the times that I have logged in, I've just felt awful. But my memories of using Facebook, usually for work or something like that, is just like even when I was engaging, I just the sense of the the surveillance, like the sense of someone finding this post that wasn't it wasn't intended for. It was just kind of like, you know, interacting with relatives at a wedding all times, like that kind of like sunny kind of is something sinister is happening underneath the like underneath the smiles, but let's like all be very sunny and professional-ish. And um yeah, so I I I could never really deal with that um because it it felt like work even when it wasn't work.
SPEAKER_00I completely understand that feeling. I was off Facebook for I would say a couple of years, I think. And then I got it back because it's just like the way that you keep in touch with so many people, right? And it feels so difficult, and it can almost feel like because so much has moved onto Facebook, it can almost feel like if you're not on there, you're being excluded from things that are happening, and it's like you should know about this thing because it was on Facebook, but you're not on Facebook, so you don't know. And like it's completely wild, right? It's like become this really essential piece of how we live in the real world. And in that way, it becomes this platform that like everyone kind of has to have if you want to just be part of like this social life.
SPEAKER_01That's so funny because I'm reminded of I I had moved to LA uh five years ago, and when I I moved there, I had a friend who was just like telling me about this party that you went to and something else, and I was and and um it's like wait, how did he hear about it? Of course she was just like hearing about a Facebook event, and I realized what a burden I would be to just like ask her whenever there was a party in our mix of like you know, art and tech kind of community of people.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um, but I still did not want to join. And it was just this weird, and I I keep thinking back to that moment as like if I had signed up for Facebook, could I have formed enough of a social life that I would I would still be in LA? I mean, it was just like things like like they're actually it might have impacted me, but I I know I I know it just it's something that does not work for me. And I I have enough people who know that I'm set in my ways that they come to me unless I move into a city like LA and everybody else has their habits and they don't care if I know about it or not.
SPEAKER_00That's good though. And I I feel like there's been this uh at least personally, like I've been like trying to reduce, if not eliminate, like my uses of these major platforms in recent years, just because like I hate them and like I hate the companies and I hate their business models so much. And like I just want to get away, but it can it can feel so tough, right? Because of how they've just worked their ways into all the different aspects of our lives and you know, just how we how we exist in this world. And like it's so it's so frustrating because it's like we we can't escape, you know. They're just like they are like a utility in a sense that we just have to rely on, but they're not owned or controlled by us in like any way.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and if anything, or like setting the terms to be able to use because I I've just I I only use Twitter on my phone. And so I I uh one day I just deleted the app. And I think because I've had the app on for for years and years, I just did not have any of the kind of algorithmically sorted view of of the uh of Twitter. But then I I I deleted it for a couple days, re-download it, and now I'm like, oh my gosh, if my tweets don't get at least one fave, they will be hidden from everyone and no one will ever see it. And it's just like that, it's it's actually forcing you in order to even have a community experience there, you have to phrase things in that like really attention-getting way. And uh that's becoming more and more part of um the user experience is just like the terms that they've set for you to be very eye-catching and and attention grabbing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I totally get that. And I actually have the Facebook app removed from my phone. I only use it on desktop because I'm like, that's the way I won't use it like nearly as much, you know? So that's like one way I I try to get around it without actually deleting the account completely. But and I completely understand that about Twitter too, right? Because the all the platforms just build it in this way, especially these kind of like social media interaction platforms where like you you want these likes and you want these faves because like it gives you that sort of validation and and you know that people are like seeing it and liking it. Um if you if you get that, right? And and and it's not just from people who are trying to like, you know, build a brand as a writer or like trying to build a community or something, right? You even get it from like regular people who are just going about their everyday lives on Facebook and posting about stuff with their family and friends, and they're like, you know, are are are the people who I know like liking my post and am I getting that validation from that, right? So it it's so interesting. And one piece I definitely wanted to touch on while speaking with you was the way that our labor is actually essential to creating these platforms in that very way, you know, because all of our posts on Twitter, all of our posts on Facebook, but even beyond that, because you talk about how uh when Google was making its search engine, like in the early days, rather than just kind of indexing the web, it relied in large part on the changes that individuals were making to their personal websites and the metadata that they set and kind of the way that they were using the internet in order to properly rank the web pages and to see what people were actually doing with them. So it was the labor of users and the people who were using the web that were really essential to creating Google in the same way that our posts and whatnot are essential to Facebook and Twitter and all that today.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. This is one of those stories about the founding of Google that I'm I'm surprised isn't better known because the way that it became so prominent as a search engine is because they had the best search engine. The other search engines were you had asked Jeeves or something, I think Leikos, like all of these search engines that you just enter information, you enter a search string in, and it would be kind of like a jumble of results because they were searching just for the words. But uh the page rank, um, what they came up with as a formula to decide what would be the most relevant results, they were looking at the words that were in a link. So if the text you used on the link to uh the Museum of Modern Art or the Words Museum of Modern Art, they would score that as, oh, this is probably a link to the Museum of Modern Art. Why would someone just use that language for a link to Yosemite Park or something? I mean, it's probably what the reason that it's a link. Um and so that would also mean that it would get high scores for museum or art or other things. So these are decisions that users made when they were setting up web pages. Um and the thing is we we're not really seeing that return back to the user because this is a a business. It's it's not a co-op, it's not a nonprofit. It's they're using this information to build a business and scale it up.
SPEAKER_00It's so interesting as well because search has just become like one of these really essential tools to using the web. And we have so little control over it. And another, I think, really important piece when considering the history of Google in particular is that like it wasn't one of these companies that was founded in a garage and like built by these entrepreneurs, right? Um, the the founders of Google were at Stanford, they got public research funding. Google was the recipient of government grants when it was getting started. And then this tool that was developed at a university with public funds was then privatized and turned into the company that is Google now, right?
SPEAKER_01I mean, that's one of those things I don't really get into it much in the book, but I am kind of fascinated with the the different class backgrounds of various founders. And so with Google, you have very much academics and Zuckerberg. Well, he dropped out of Harvard, but he didn't stop using Harvard in every single possible press release and like mention it all the time.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But Twitter, Twitter was founded by Ev Williams and Viz Stone. They were working at Google, but they were working class dropouts. So there was like a pushback to these academics and where the were the people who had very humble upbringings. And it's something that I I would like to see more research into it because one thing that's very intriguing about Silicon Valley is that it's a place that being a dropout is not the stigma is not quite the same. Now, a dropout, if you're a white cisgender man, um is very different from other kinds of dropouts or high school graduates. But that's that's one of those things where um I feel like publishing and the media is still not quite getting Silicon Valley or the tech industry in general, because of like the very funny ways that class plays in that industry as opposed to in publishing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I think that's an interesting point. I was recently talking to Rob Larson, um, and and we sort of touched on that as well because Bill Gates obviously comes from this, you know, quite wealthy and well-off family in Washington State. Jeff Bezos, uh, like we were talking about this as well, how Jeff Bezos, how Peter Thiel, how Elon Musk kind of uh have these fathers who were engineers and had these links to colonial Cuba in the the case of Bezos' father and apartheid South Africa in the case of Teal and and Elon Musk, right? And you know, kind of obviously gained some wealth uh through their associations with that. So it is really interesting to kind of see the class backgrounds of a lot of these founders. And honestly, I hadn't known so much about the working class backgrounds of some of them as well, because it seemed like there were a lot that were coming from this more well off background, even though they presented themselves as like these really kind of self made individuals, right?
SPEAKER_01I would say that's the case for most of the founders. But there are still a few, and still certainly executives and workers. It had pretty early on presented itself as like an alternate path for someone who might not have fit in to say media publishing, Hollywood, even Wall Street. And another like wrinkle there that is something that I've I've been thinking a lot about is that we have these stories about, you know, I've talked about this in my book, why I wrote my book as my first internet experience as RAOL is because I was so tired of hearing about people who set up BBSs when they were seven. And like their father came home with a computer and their father was a computer engineer. And so there is like also this like upper middle class background of like your father was an engineer and he brought home a computer in the 80s, and so you had a head start, and that's why you have a career in in computer science. And then I so I wanted to kind of push back that a little bit with well, yes, I was on AOL. It was very ordinary, it was for the masses. Um, and just like kind of push back against these narratives because it is a lot more complicated than um as simple as like these were all rich white guys, they they were white guys, but uh the class thing is still a little bit tricky.
SPEAKER_00That's so interesting. And and like I completely agree with you. I feel like so many of the stories that I see are like, yeah, you know, my dad brought home this computer when I was like a kid, like, you know, way back when before the internet was even really kind of getting going, right? And so obviously those people have kind of a leg up on the others who might be trying to get into the industry. And I think when we talk about kind of the people who are present in our histories of tech and the people who maybe we leave out or are not even so aware that that we're leaving them out, I think your book provided a really interesting and really insightful example of that because you talked about how at the time that the internet was growing and kind of you know emerging, people were getting online. It was the same time that the AIDS crisis was gripping the world, right? And how as a result of that, there was a large group of queer people who were not online and who were not participating in that kind of emergence in the same way that many other people were. Um, and that we potentially missed out on you know a lot as a result of that. So do you have any further thoughts on that? And and maybe even just further, you can explain, you know, your thinking on that in the book.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. I I'm glad that you're asking this because it was something that I kind of debated when I was working on the book whether to include it or not, because I didn't have um, I wrote it very awkwardly, but to kind of uh explain the context of it. In that chapter, I talk a lot about Silicon Alley 90s New York tech scene. And I wanted to give people a look at what the tech scene was like back then and show that it was more diverse than people seemed to think. There were uh people of color founding uh online communities, there were many women who were who were founding startups, and so that perspective should open up this idea that yes, like the what you think of New York and New York culture was very much the culture of the internet in the 90s coming out of New York. But the absence there is that because you know, I was starting out right around 1990, an important art and culture-oriented community in New York was just absent. And I think uh another part of that was I was reading the David von Rot um biography by Cynthia Carr. And I just I I early on in writing this book, and that book it was just something that I picked up and sped through because it's beautifully written. But just seeing all of his references to surveillance and seeing how he was a very multimedia-oriented artist, um, and knowing, you know, it was Laurie Anderson that loved the internet. It was Chris Marker who took to the internet. These artists who had a very multidisciplinary, multimedia oriented practice, they were the ones who really took to the internet. And I remember reading that book and being, I wonder what he would have done with the internet. So I added this, it's it's just like several paragraphs. It's quite brief, but I'm I'm glad it it resonated because I I just I wanted to respect that there had been an absence in the city and um give people an opportunity to imagine what could have been.
SPEAKER_00I thought it was a great inclusion because so often when things are lacking, it can be so difficult to even recognize that they're not there, right? And especially when you consider the importance of the internet and online communities to a lot of queer people um in discovering and learning more about uh you know their sexualities, their genders, or what have you. Um that's so important to so many queer people and then to think that I don't know, it it could have been even more important in in such a greater way had you know this this real crisis not hit the queer community and uh taken out so many you know, just so many people in it who could have been using the internet and uh getting that started and growing that uh at a much earlier stage, you know.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00So I love that piece of your book. E even though it was only a few paragraphs. But you know, I I think it I think it drew attention to an important thing that, you know, uh again, it it wasn't something that I had seen before. So maybe it's again another thing that there does need to be more writing and and researching on and just thinking on, you know, w what that might have looked at, and even just chronicling the ways that queer communities were using the internet at that really early stage to have it there, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. I mean that that's what I hope my book might do is that give people ideas of areas that there isn't a lot of writing about at the moment because there is a lot to say. And I I'm kind of I thought of my book always as like, okay, if you have eight hours to tell someone everything you know about the internet, go. And that's that's all that I was just like, how much can I stuff in here in as little time as possible and still make it enjoyable? And so if people find things in there and they want to run with it, I hope they do because um we we certainly need more writing on these subjects.
SPEAKER_00You know, personally, obviously I think it's a success because I really like your vote. And so I wanted to ask you about one more thing, because speeding up to the present, there um I think is this kind of ongoing change in how we use tech platforms because you know, COVID 19, this pandemic is is raging and we're all stuck at home. Um, you know, Facebook and Instagram and they say that these uh YouTube, they say that these platforms are kind of uh seeing greater use than they normally do because people are stuck at home and this is the way that many people are having to communicate now. Um I know personally, like I've taken note of how it's terrible to say, but like there just seems to be more death kind of like when I'm scrolling through Twitter and like you see these stories about earlier on it was you know about China and then about Italy, and then you know, as it hit more European countries, uh Spain after that, um, and now that what's happening in the United States is really terrible and really tragic and really concerning, right? Um, so I wonder if you have any thoughts on how COVID-19 is maybe again kind of affecting our our experiences online and having to be so reliant on these platforms.
SPEAKER_01One thing I think is interesting about this moment is that we've just gone through a decade of mobile being the way of interacting online. That we were just talking about what we have on our phone and what we don't, I I only check Twitter on my phone, you only check Facebook on your on your computer. Um, but the experience of the internet being on your person as you're out in the world, you snap a photo of your vacation, send it, put it on Instagram, check into something on on Foursquare or look up a restaurant on Yelp when you're in a new town, like all of these experiences have been our experience of the internet for the past 10 years. Um and now, like you said, many of us back in our homes, it's it's a weird throwback to that early odds internet. So I'm using my laptop for the internet, which I haven't really done in years. Like I'm very careful about um making sure that my my laptop is my workspace, writing only, except for some research kind of things. But now all of a sudden it's just I'm having these video chats and I'm checking things that I normally would only look at on my phone and sharing my home with the people I'm communicating with. So that's that stationary aspect of the internet, like all of a sudden, because the users are are stationary, that's really interesting. And I'm not sure what's going to come of it. Um, I'm not sure if, say, in two years we are back in the world. Are we using the internet the same way? Are we using mobile apps the same way? Are we thinking of the internet as maybe it's better off in the house? That could be possible. Um with video chat, I I remember feeling like, oh, this is not so fun when it's on my phone because it's just like a little screen. But when it's on your laptop, it's okay. But the other thing that I I think is interesting about that question is the aspects of of grieving and having to uh account for these tragedies, these deaths that we're encountering on platforms as stories. I mean, I hope people are seeing these stories because there are so many and they're outrageous in many times, like how unfair or exploitative a lot of the work, especially the situations of of workers who don't have protections and having that as part of the ordinary scroll, I know that I'm not quite my ordinary sarcastic self on um on platforms as I might ordinarily be. Just I feel very awkward like promoting stuff of my own because it feels like I don't want to be mixed in with this moment that at least among the people that I follow on on Twitter are being quite I I feel like I follow good people on Twitter, so they're really like respectful and aware of what's going on. And just like taking that as part of the context that we're speaking in. But I have been splintering off into various kind of group chats and group DMs, and that's energizing in in a way that I uh I haven't felt about social media in a long time because all of a sudden in a little group DM, there's there's no pressure to go viral. It's just you and your several friends, and then the other thing that's really nice, um you can kind of let it sit for a couple days, and then maybe someone shows up and has something to say, and then you disappear, and it's i if there's you know, if it's like five close friends that are just all various places of the country, you just kind of drop in and say something. And remember when when forums were like that, that you didn't have to write something every single hour? It was just kind of casual you drop in, maybe remember, oh, I'm gonna go to that message board tomorrow. So that that's slowing things down a little bit, decentralizing it a little bit, even on the platforms. I mean, these are group DMs I'm using Twitter. Um, but I'm finding I I don't want to say the internet's great now because it's actually it's just the ways that people are using technology, whereas you can't see people in person. Um, so it's kind of doing more than the internet ever should have to. Um but I will say that people are given these circumstances, it's interesting to see people users take control of their internet experiences and say, hey, I just don't want to like go viral anymore. I'm just gonna have this group chat and and that's going to be my social media experience.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I think that's a great observation. And you know, I I hope more people are experiencing that and and diving into group DMs and things instead, right? I remember I have this group chat and like as you say, like sometimes you know, people just don't post in it for a long period of time. If in my case, like the one that comes to mind is this group chat with uh my coworkers uh who I worked with in Australia all the way back in 2015. And like it used to be much more active. And now it like like once a year or a few times a year, like someone might post and then all of a sudden, like for a few days we're like chatting and then it goes silent again until something else comes up and we're all like talking again. And like it's it's uh just so cool, you know, it's just so fun. Um well Joanne, it was fantastic speaking with you today. Uh your book is just I I just think it's so interesting and it makes us think about uh the way that you know we use the web and we interact online and and how that has has changed over many years. And uh like you also say, like, even though I think there is some nostalgia for the way that things used to be, you kind of say like we shouldn't be nostalgic necessarily because this just shows that we're really eager for uh you know a better internet and a better way to interact online, right? And uh, you know, hopefully as you say something better or or thinking about something better or how how we can interact better, how we might use these platforms better, you know, maybe how we might take control of these platforms might come out of this, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I hope so.
SPEAKER_00Certainly do as well. All right, well, it's been great speaking with you. Thanks so much for taking the time.
SPEAKER_01This is great, thank you.
SPEAKER_00Joanne McNeil is the author of Lurking, How a Person Became a User. It was published by MCD Books, and you can buy it from your local bookstore, you can borrow it from your local library, or you can get it anywhere else that sells books. You can follow Joanne on Twitter at J O M C. You can follow the podcast at at TechWalk Save us, and you can follow me at Parismarks at Parismarks. If you like the interview, please leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, and thanks so much for listening.