Selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2011, and received an honorable mention for the AoIR 2012 book award.


“‘We are romantics even, and perhaps especially, in the face of high technologies,’ writes Thomas Streeter. In his profound and illuminating analysis of the interactions between technology and desire, Streeter shows how conflicting visions of the internet have not so much reflected the pre-given triumph of a new technology as shaped the possibilities and limitations of who we are and who we might become.”

-- Peter Stallybrass, Annenberg Professor of Humanities and Director of the History of Material Texts, University of Pennsylvania


“One part palm reader and one part politico, Streeter makes total sense of the Internet: its 60s roots, its 90s ethos, and why it works and feels the way it does today. Whether or not you remember firsthand what a long strange trip it’s been,
The Net Effect will persuade you with its lucid rendering of the shared experiences, strange bedfellows, and stealth mythologies that have shaped what it means to be online.”

—Lisa Gitelman, NYU, and author of Always, Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture


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