“When was the internet a good time for you?” I posed this very unscientific question to a few coworkers around the library. A Gen Xer, who only really got online around 2009 (but clarified they’re “not a Luddite”) said around that time, when Googling became second nature and Facebook was still new and not yet a source of FOMO. A fellow millennial said the early 2000s, instant messaging on AOL with middle school friends and perusing MySpace. One baby boomer I spoke to said it was after upgrading to broadband from dial-up, uploading photos to Flickr and trading music (CDs and LPs) with fellow fans online. Another boomer said, actually, now and during the pandemic, which gave her an excuse to reconnect with friends around their shared hobby/passion for art.
In some cases, people’s first response (among the older set, especially) was basically the internet never really was a good time, which is fair. I’d then qualify that by “good time,” I meant when being online was less coercive and more voluntary; often saying “the internet before Facebook” was enough to prompt more discussion. Similar to how the pandemic upended everyday life and muddled memory of anything that happened in 2019 and earlier — so-called the “before times” — Facebook seems to fuzz recollections of the Web before it and the ways people interacted through it.
Joanne McNeil addresses that fuzzing directly and evocatively in “Lurking: How a Person Became a User,” which, as Ava Kofman writes here “traces how the suburban enclave of AOL gave way to the funhouse of Myspace and the affective marketplace of Friendster,” and so on into the present. McNeil’s art background and first-hand experiences come through in critical yet personable writing: “part memoir, part cultural history,” in Kofman’s words. Indeed, each chapter foregrounds a key element of the web that impacted users and existing institutions: anonymity, visibility and search, for a few examples. Chapters often open with personal anecdotes from McNeil, offering natural entry points for readers too young, too old or just uninitiated, into a period when the web seemed, to quote a recent essay, “less cyberspace, more cyberplace.” McNeil recalls vividly the hopes, interests and insecurities that drew people to these networks and services, as well as the inequitable access — for both users and would-be administrators — that made the networks majority white and often male-centric.
“Lurking” juxtaposes these personal, ethnographic accounts with close readings of the sites’ developers and tech firms and their cultures. “Company culture is to a company what motivation is to character,” McNeil writes. Some of the names will likely be familiar, e.g. Google’s Eric Schmitt and Sergey Brin. But others less so, like Stacy Horn, who founded the regional bulletin board system, Echo (“East Coast Hang Out”), with a vision far removed from Silicon Valley. Revisiting these founders and the cultures they reflected and worked to instill, the book dispels convenient “tales of lone geniuses saving the world,” as McNeil puts it, drawing attention to the convergence of the technologies and firms on lax regulations, flexible labor, and proximity to the US intelligence spending, not to mention access to valuable data harvested from users. Users (that is, us!) who nonetheless negotiate the trade-offs moment to moment and, as the book details, resist and claim space in what ways they can.
A movie that captures one experience of being online in an earlier web is director Shunji Iwai’s “All About Lily Chou-Chou.” Joanne McNeil praised the movie in a recent review for Filmmaker magazine for how it “evokes the gaps and hesitancy in early internet communication.” In fact, the first words exchanged are not spoken, but typed out on screen. McNeil notes, “We can hear the clack of an old keyboard and another tap to refresh” as cryptic messages emerge. These are intercut with picturesque shots of a young teen schoolboy in a field, headphones on and cradling a portable CD player. The messages come out of Lilyphillia, “an online forum devoted to Lily Chou-Chou, a mysterious pop singer” whose mystique McNeil likens to Björk (she reminded me a little of ever-elusive Sia, too). The boy, Yūichi (aka Philia, the administrator of the message board), and his classmates share their adoration cloaked safely behind screen names, letting them gush over Lily and also vent (albeit obliquely, through fandom) feelings of grief, boredom and anxiety, without fear of ridicule “IRL.”
The plot follows Yūichi and peers in their everyday ‘away from keyboard’ lives, through familiar and, in many cases, all too real situations. An early scene finds them stealing CDs from one music store to pawn at another. When Yūichi’s mother is informed, she strikes him, but, as McNeil points out, is quick to forgive him. Later, when Yūichi and his boy friends visit a small island on a hunch Lily may have referenced it, the boys point camcorders at scenery, each other and, predictably, the older girls leading the tour. Yet the girls push back, evading the lens and brushing off the boys’ awkward flirtations, while the video captured goes nowhere. This and the shoplifting felt like a pleasant change from American cinema’s often moralistic and needlessly punitive narratives, where adolescent mistakes and digressions haunt characters forever. In the midst of the scenes, the teens’ message board posts cut in, kind of like a commentary track, though not recounting what they did or thought, but their moods.
“Lily Chou-Chou” also portrays genuine harm. Content Note: the film depicts severe bullying, sexual assault and suicide. The traumas on screen, as in real life, are neither really resolved nor do those doing harm or the onlookers (themselves bullied previously) face the accountability necessary to make amends and interrupt the cycle. Meanwhile, their shared time spent on Lilyphilia “seems less like a sanctuary of healing,” McNeil writes, “than a numbing force. Perhaps [Yūichi’s] care for Lily… should be siphoned to the people around him, who, like him, suffer alone in the world.” It seems sadly fitting that as the film turns 20 this year, one of the top songs of 2021, “Sun Goes Down” by Lil Nas X, touches on youthful loneliness, queerphobia and suicidal ideation. Similar to the young members of Lilyphilia, the hip-hop star found belonging in online music fandom, but, on a more hopeful note, the experience, rather than numbing him, inspired a transformative “leap of faith” into music-making and, in time, out of the closet.
