Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters
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.
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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.
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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.
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