Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why it Matters
Sep 2025 · Verso Books
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About this ebook
The story of how you created internet culture and why it matters
Since the nineties, platforms have invited users to create in return for connection. From blogs to vlogs, tweets to memes: for the first time in history, making art became the fundamental form of communication.
What started as fun soon became currency, something vital to finding friends, work, and love. Then, as ‘meatspace’ job security eroded, online creativity became work itself. Now an internet presence is no longer optional, platforms increasingly charge users. Whatever it is we’re creating online, it isn’t amateur anymore. But is it art?
In this scintillating philosophical history of the internet, Joanna Walsh, author of Girl Online, examines how and why creativity became the price of digital existence.
Since the nineties, platforms have invited users to create in return for connection. From blogs to vlogs, tweets to memes: for the first time in history, making art became the fundamental form of communication.
What started as fun soon became currency, something vital to finding friends, work, and love. Then, as ‘meatspace’ job security eroded, online creativity became work itself. Now an internet presence is no longer optional, platforms increasingly charge users. Whatever it is we’re creating online, it isn’t amateur anymore. But is it art?
In this scintillating philosophical history of the internet, Joanna Walsh, author of Girl Online, examines how and why creativity became the price of digital existence.
The story of how you created internet culture and why it matters
Since the nineties, platforms have invited users to create in return for connection. From blogs to vlogs, tweets to memes: for the first time in history, making art became the fundamental form of communication.
What started as fun...
About the author
Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of twelve books (several co-written with DIY AIs that she coded), her publishers include Semiotext(e), Bloomsbury and Verso. She is the creator of the digital narratives, seed-story.com and miss-communication.ie. Her work has been performed/exhibited at venues including IMMA, the ICA, BETA Festival Dublin, and Sample Studios Cork. She founded and directed the online activist projects @read_women (2014-18), and @noentry_arts (2019_2024). She was the 2020 Markievicz Awardee for Literature, the 2017 UK Arts Foundation fellow for literature; an Anthony Burgess Centenary Writer Fellow at the University of Manchester and a 2024 DAAD Artists in Berlin awardee (refused in solidarity with the Palestine).
Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of twelve books (several co-written with DIY AIs that she coded), her publishers include Semiotext(e), Bloomsbury and Verso. She is the creator of the digital narratives, seed-story.com and miss-communicatio...
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