PositiveThe New RepublicMcNeil bears witness to the process by which, as she puts it in the subtitle of the book, \'a person became a user,\' a process that she seems to regard as both a historic inevitability and one that we can profoundly shape ... And that makes Lurking the perfect book for our historic moment ... It’s...easy to assume that the promise was always hollow and that we were dupes from the beginning for logging in, for making our first Google search, for creating that first profile page. But to put all blame on the platforms, McNeil suggests, is to go too easy on ourselves. We have all partly shaped the history of the internet with our own actions, so to reflect on it is to come to terms with our own arrangements, compromises, and conveniences ... To be a user is to ask yourself what your reasons and purposes are, to what ends you use what you use ... New apps promise to make the coronavirus crisis manageable by tracing our movements and alerting us if close physical contacts get sick. When we as persons are totally lost, stuck at home, and glued helplessly to screens, it seems that we as users have to come to our own rescue.
