Walsh’s book reads a lot like the internet: dizzying in scope, perceptive even when it gets caught up in nonsense ... Walsh hits her stride by taking Grossman’s emphasis on digital labor ... Walsh’s style is giddy with possibility ... Overtures to Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida decelerate her slapdash style, though Walter Benjamin feels necessary in our age of digital reproduction ... [There are] haphazard tangents...these ideas are rich enough for more exploration ... The ‘we’ and ‘us’ is jarring but intentional.
Sprawling and theoretically rich ... These chapters are arranged in no particular order, which can be confusing ... This disorienting randomness is, I think, part of Walsh’s stated purpose as an amateur on amateurs ... When this works, it works well ... Rather than dismissing aesthetics, Walsh is alert to their radical potential ... Walsh’s greatest strength is the attention she pays to labor ... Wide-ranging, dense, and passionate .. If this all sounds a bit exhausting, that’s because it is. Some of Walsh’s references are underdeveloped; others rely on a hefty level of prior reading ... Amateurs! demands the engagement it theorizes, engagement that is a form of amateurish attentiveness, that is also a form of love.
Amateurs! is also like the internet in its juxtaposition of the high (as in high theory) and the low (as in LOLcats). Sometimes this evokes the textual tension of a meme, an enjoyable friction between content and form ... Sometimes, though, it feels more like a specific meme...an ocean of text in a microscopic font, a treatise where a snappy phrase should do. Some juxtapositions can feel embarrassing, even cringe ... The problem isn’t that Walsh...merely mimes professionals like Ngai; it’s that the imitation game isn’t fun ... Walsh summons smart-sounding support for a claim like an academic aiming to impress a peer reviewer rather than helping the reader see ... Playful and illuminating apposition can easily devolve into...parody ... The book’s mashing together of aesthetic autonomy and Autostraddle...works best as a kind of scrapbook ... But the failure of a point to land doesn’t offer the same delights as the failure of a tweet.
There’s a great book to be written about how everyday users create the content that powers the web, while billionaires reap the profits. But this one isn’t it ... [One argument is] right on target ... [Walsh] makes more than that economic argument, though. She also argues that web users have created their own distinctive online aesthetic and traces how that aesthetic has evolved since the earliest days of the web. And that’s where things go off the rails ... Her writing and analysis of the changing web’s aesthetic is so full of dense jargon, fractured syntax, and attempts to be au courant at all times, that it’s largely incomprehensible ... It’s also seriously marred by Walsh trying far too hard to find big meanings and portents where there are none ... Suffice it to say, in Walsh’s desperate attempt to find meaning where there’s none, she gets everything in it wrong.
Perceptive but meandering ... The author’s interpretations are fresh and insightful ... Her choice in subjects, too, is pleasantly surprising ... However, the book’s sharpness is dulled by copious quotes from other theorists. It’s strongest during more focused moments, among them an impassioned defense of the 'trash essay' ... Despite the title, this is best suited for those well-versed in the subject.