Mcneil traces the Digital World in unexpected and excitable ways. Reviewing what has been lost what have been stolen and what possibilities may still be recovered. We are so pleased to hope to host this event here. [applause]. Ive a really brief reading i wanted to do. It is just a short passage this is in that chapter called sharing. Around the time of the first iphone launch it was possible if unwise. The hold over since its famous. Super bowl commission commercial. In 200710 years later it was made on the list. With the iphone they were off to the races. They sold almost 40 million. Now the figure is north of 200 million new apple phones each year. The Company Unique for its designed approach product and function and appearance. Was built to be handled i can intimate acquaintance. In time people would learn about fox con and the loss of human lives. It was too expensive certainly. Steve jobs announced the future of the times the first decade nearly parallels the year in the white house. Obama left office in 2017. Barack obama was the first president to have a twitter account. Friends, coaches in an Upscale Hotel room. And independently they talked about the experiences the spark that crystallized the corresponding timelines of the iphone are an abundant hasp lets not forget that meanwhile there was a great recession. A lot of broke people carried magic phones too. It seemed like all of the ads in the subway were there. Maybe it was the other way around. There is an app for that. And it was very often. The iphone became common in every day eyeglasses but it felt new for a long while. Past the point of actually being new. Ten years after the phone hit shelves people still talked about it like a new creation. The changes occurred in little icon boxes. The users changed while the change while the hardware for the most part did not. There were moments when i will pause in a flecked on how world changing the iphone has been. Before the iphone people texted from clamshells in flip shot contraptions. I picked up the slickest device for the online store. Now i remember that some for us samsung flip. It have a throaty shutter click like a power tool. My hand trembled a little when i press a button to take a photo. I dont think i bothered to upload the pictures. And it again had to be any better. I wanted one of course but i wanted like a shinier paperweight. It would cost 500 and still another to your commute commitment. I thought the difference between it was meant to be funny. I thought the difference between a clamshell and an iphone was like the difference between economy and firstclass. Not the distance between two destination. It was organized by a local startup. I walked away with a tiny check and an iphone as a parting gift. It has been in my hand or pocket or totebag ever since. I held the iphone so gently at first like applying eyeshadow with my fingertips. What else do people handle with such care. I started to go to bed with it. It became a paperweight to west and rest on a pillow. Now i can give it. The same way i dont think of my fork that was on my plate. Elsewhere and far away it became more immediate through the iphone. It was last present less urgent than it was in a moment i wondered about. I find myself bumping into strangers more frequently. I never got bored waiting for a train. I no longer dreaded sitting alone with a drink when a friend was running late. I always have something to do. I was never alone. Even when i wasnt using the phone to talk never alone there was always a one window in between my thumb. [applause]. See mike im so excited to be in conversation with you about this book. I really loved and im thrilled i get to ask you questions about it and with that since you and luckily decided to put me up here with you and get us get my first question and go straight into my second. You chose the title looking in the way you to find. I it. I cant do justice. I will try is in the book itself. It could be a waiting room before communication embraced delay like the clink of an old dialup sound. A moment to pause and prepare from exchange with others to get ones feet wet or it could be and act like reading for work or research or general curiosity. From the beginning and curious what brought you to choose that as the title for the book. The motivating metaphor. The way of engaging with the internet in the book. Could you talk a little bit about that . It seems like the most obvious title for me because thats what i do. Thats my identity as an internet user. It is very much my process of internet use. Its very much being the wallflower of the social network. The thing that makes the internet somewhat unusual though. People can see you standing in the corner. You can easily be the create but people cant necessarily see you watching them. I think its one of those things has to do with the elements that make interactions online somewhat unusual from physical world interactions and sometimes because we take for granted how much our communications are woven in our daily lives that core difference of physical and the Digital World i wanted to make clear in that title. So lurking as the preferred way of interacting with the internet. Is there a specific places online that you consider yourself primarily a lurker. Ive never have a reddit profile but i spent a lot of time there. Especially in the corners that are very sweet and unexpected. I think that that there are areas that are very toxic and had many problems. They are created the people facing homelessness and its all about exchanging resources with an air of in an amenity thats a place where it is a lot about screen names as opposed to real names. I dont participate myself there are a lot of communities that i find useful information as. And then in the book i go through that communities the message boards. Before i would leave a post i would definitely spend months making sure that i would be welcomed. As so im noting that the title is lurking. And we do have folks looking at the edge of the room. But just like with the internet we wont make you participate in this particular way. I think that point is so interesting because one of the weird things about it i read a fair amount of legal advice as a lawyer. Which its probably a form of viewing other peoples pain. I think its sort of funny because its actually gotten a lot of peoples way of interacting with this particular form of the internet is through twitter. Someone will post something very ridiculous and a lot of people respond on twitter. That is such a classic example of how a conversation im sure is still usually quite bizarre and heated in its own way if you take it to another platform like twitter where there is already this underlying irony attached to it in the sense that you always had to be above the content item that is what makes twitter distinctive. You cant really be too sincere about things. What is incredibly funny about that and twitter. When i first logged onto twitter. I was told i was too much of a jerk for a social network. Look at all of these nice people sharing what theyre eating for breakfast and why am i not a nice person who could just freely share these peaceful moments of our life. Why do i have to make the weird jokes. Nowadays i feel like im overwhelmed with the edge to the content. The everything has to be its an element of distancing yourself from the platform that if you can laugh at everything youre not so entwined. You have some layer with a personal distance. I think it can be a way to distance yourself. Im not as invested as the infested as the people who are choosing to post. Someone that as much of a lurker online it is not a lack is not a lack of investment. Im not less invested. Some places i suspect im more invested. I still get that sense of distance. You framed the book in terms of a lurking and becoming a user. One of the things you talk about a fair amount in the book is facebook which i thought was interesting because of features like the offline profiles were offline profiles were the ultimate in renaming it is some poor person they decided they didnt want to face the profile. They go from all of the things they do even though they are not on facebook. How do you think about you big u. S. Tracking pick qs tracking on the web. And that is another element of the title thats not lurking. Its not something possible on the internet which is designed to track activity all of those elements who are the functions of this especially Something Like facebook where its attached to the data on the users. That is another element of this advantage. You can walk away from things and perhaps if we dont have surveillance cameras. Its a way of sort of leaving without a trace. So lets just switch topics a little bit. One part of the book i read with a lot of interest was your section on text. As someone who at times identified with that label. In new many of the participants. I was appreciating the humility with which you approached it. You say your can resist the urge of the theory. And why they seemed more likely to address international concerns. Im not going to ask you to leave the grand narrative. But just note this seems like a little bit overly kind to me that i look at the time that you highlighted and i see actually a real lack of attention to race. It ended up bleeding over into what i would call the white women focus. Its what we still see. The way in which there is a very different version of white feminism. That is the feminist contractors. At the same time it is a version of white feminism. Certainly there were bright spots. I think there is a lot to be said about that. I would be curious about your process in thinking about that chapter has a real moment where i think you are reflecting on how not to just come off as nostalgic in a way that is ahistorical about the positive parts of the internet. And how your views that was an intense moment. And an eyeopening one. At the time i was based in new york and i remember as elements became unavoidable on platforms like twitter and facebook the professional feminist media at that time was not addressing some of the inter sectional elements that went into this harassment. In some of the resources that i found that were pertinent were things like the feminism. It seemed so much beyond immediate presentation of gender inequality that. Of time we can see it coincides with the activism too. Certainly black lives matter i do remember especially at the womens march in 2016 having a feeling like weve really come so far. A lot of basic understanding of inclusion that wouldve been quite radical three years prior is accepted much more broadly im always hesitant to name certain factors more than other i do think as problematic as twitter is in these major platforms are the nature of having Something Like twitter where you have trending topics and someone could create a hashtag and youve got to discuss personal experiences and having that Community Element in a platform that is designed for multiple communities it pushes forward some more progressive ideas. I say that with a lot of hesitation for the most part those platforms that are designed for everyone are very dangerous. And this is one of the tradeoffs because say you have a twitter account with many types of people few people from backgrounds very different than yours. Seen your experiences and their experiences and their arguments as part of a conversation in the part of twitter that was having a hashtag with the white women as the key. One of the turning points for this hashtag is something i dont want to discount but i dont want to credit too much. I dont want to credit twitter because twitter did nothing for that to happen. To use the platform for movements organizing and finding audiences. It doesnt necessarily represent a credit to twitter. I think your point about the way in which they may choose to follow people who arent like them. It was really interesting. The challenges of viewing yourself as a lurker is that you can gain the false sense of familiarity with the things that you experienced. You never actually interaction with them. Using these Online Platforms as a way to relating to other folks experiences. You can feel that youre much more familiar with them. A lot of folks online have talked about how they feel and are treated by white listeners. A lot of white folks think he is everybodys black friend. There is a way in which lurking can create that false sense of familiarity in the absence of any real relationship which leads to awkwardness and at most times can lead to people feeling entitled to other folks attention. The other reflection i want to offer on that one of the challenges that we have talked a little bit about one of the reasons that it was successful in putting out materials was because they didnt need those materials to make money. We can put this online for free. I think one of the other challenges of lurking as it can be easy to appropriate are not necessarily credit peoples ideas if you are experiencing them in this way there is a weird flipside to experiencing or inclusive city of understanding other peoples experiences through interacting with them from a distance. The example i think as we see plenty of tweets from people at airports complaining about some service elements. We dont see tweets from airport workers because they would get fired. These platforms might appear to be a representation of Public Opinion but its always a very privileged Public Opinion or a Public Opinion that they have taken certain risks to share. That is a really key part of this that there is a tradeoff. A lot of people made the decision this is can be a little bit embarrassing but i have a Community Care here i have a moment. Its always been the case with any kind of social media or blogs or people with a substantially less power and assistance gig economy workers. Its almost like the lift drivers do not exist on twitter. I know part of that is my filter bubble. Part of that is because i am following a very fullterm timeline but i also know that the opportunity to share this experience from being someone so precarious. Is possibly not even breaking even it is very much a last resort for people. So that is one thing. Every once in a while people say twitter is the representation of a real life. It is what people of various degrees of power choose to share the net another thing is there are still strategies and tactics that people can take to be porous enough to be open to the general public. In the book i talk to someone who is a moderator for reddit designed for women and gaming. If you know anything about women and gaming its not the friendliest place in the world. At the same time you have to understand that they dont want to be so exclusive that some kid in a small town who knows no one else can use the internet when they just find their people. They want to be porous enough to be open to their people somewhere around the world. But also had a little bit of a maze to get through to get to the actual more intense conversation. Conversations that still might not be completely unfiltered but are a little bit more loose and open than they would be on reddit. What they do is they submit a posting history to the moderator its just a way to show that youre not there to troll. You get an invite to discard server. A deeper conversation and one of those things there might be trolls that are just creating accounts faking their ways just to get access but at least it is filtered the community and not. You set me up perfectly to the extent that your book has a take a away message. Its about the power of small communities. One taught you. You dont use the phrase the magic of the internet. That has been something that have been coming up for a lot of folks. I think they had been devoting a lot of that to Building Community tools. Or imagining the internet as it was. They have a stepbystep guide called run your own social. They share some of the tactics creating an instant on macedon. It is a decentralized social network has a lot of pluses and minuses one of the drawbacks is it is kind of hard to get everybody to just get off facebook and just go to a nonsocial social network. The effect of having been on this platform schools and workplaces for some people who are privileged they can go without having a facebook account. Other people are forced into participating in the social sacrifice of having to give up that account is too great if you are at a place where you are trying to build a Community Online with people that you already know and you just want a separate move. You dont want your data taken for profit. All of those challenging factors. And the data breach. It is worth looking into and sometimes if you dont necessarily you feel like you have the technical ability using some commercial platform that has elements of distance i really think that technique and the Gaming Community she studied moderation in grad school for it. This is one of the techniques that is very easy to implement because something i think about is interesting about the internet right now. If you are a user you are also a moderator. At some point in your life youre probably get to see a conflict and possibly want to step in whether that is two neighbors who had just gotten a fight on next door it was great cynicism. That is basically only neighborhood spats. In the Daily Internet activity you will possibly see people have conflicts and perhaps youre in a place to help them disengage and deescalate the situation. And that is part of having the shift from the ultra exclusive internet that you had have the resources to afford to afford a computer to this time now a significant percentage of this country and the world they had used the internet and the use it regularly. That sense of needing to share the internet with many people who are not like you. If you are in a place to make it a little nicer do what you can. See mac thank you so much for speaking about your book. Thank you for writing it. Copies are available for purchase over there. Its really a beautifully written book. [applause]. 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