Podcasts, Phantom Broadcasts, and Other News
One of the strangest things about the timing of my book release is, I was among the last authors with an in-person event to appear on Book TV. The episode was only meant to play about once or twice, but given the quarantine situation, within a week, the show would have no new episodes. I set up an alert to find out when it would air, and ended up receiving bunches and bunches of messages, "Dear Joanne mcneil, [Lurking] is scheduled to air in 4 minutes on C-SPAN 2." The alerts usually were at three in the morning, which made it all the more strange. If I stayed up particularly late, I would see these automated emails informing me that my face was on television.
Here's the episode, by the way. I thought it went pretty well.
Book TV is now airing virtual book events so I no longer get these alerts. Although, it is possible my upcoming event at the Brooklyn Book Festival will be recorded so I will get new alerts and possibly see my face on TV at 3am once again.
I was also lucky to have one podcast episode scheduled before the coronavirus took over all conversations and way of life. If you have thirty minutes, and would like to know more about the book, I think my appearance on the Theory of Everything was one of the best interviews I did. It is certainly the best general introduction to the book besides, I guess, reading the book. It helps that Benjamen Walker is a friend and a serious reader. Plus, he has a solid history of the internet already and could ask in-depth questions specific to the book.
I also appeared on a wonderful new series called Interstitial, which is short sharply edited episodes interviewing people in design and technology. I was deep in corona-depression the day of that interview and not at my most eloquent, but David Huber did such a good job editing it, it's still a great introduction to the book (especially if you don't have a lot of time to listen to podcasts.)
Another fun interview was with Stephen Harrison for his series, Notes on Quotes. I loved this because I loved the opportunity to talk about something other than the book, haha. Stephen asks people about the quotes that inspire them. I selected E. M. Forster's lines about the "aristocracy of the sensitive." I think about this quote constantly and I was thrilled to share my thoughts about it.
Connor Habib is another friend of mine and I'm a big fan of his show Against Everyone. He is a really considerate interviewer and listening to the show always feels like being a fly on the wall while two people have a thoughtful conversation. My appearance was in the summer, a few months after the book had come out, which meant I could discuss some of the topics that hadn't come up so much in reviews and other interviews, as well as topics that didn't make it in the book—Craigslist, for instance. I went back and forth about whether to have a Craigslist section, and ultimately didn't but, as this interview shows, I have a lot to say about it.
Another really excellent podcast, Tech Won't Save Us had me on a few months back. This is solidly a podcast of tech criticism — interviews with tech critics. There might not have been enough people to interview just several years ago; so it's exciting to see a podcast like this form right at this moment as tech criticism is taking off.
Each of these interviews is very different from the next. Before my book came out, people told me to have a bunch of talking points in my back pocket. I figured I'd repeat a lot of the stuff from the Theory of Everything interview, again and again. But I didn't really have the chance to do that, nor did I really want to? There's no point reciting talking points in my pajamas. I also, thankfully, didn't have a bunch of "what's the internet like in a time of pandemic?" conversations either. The strangeness of the situation created a welcome casualness to these conversations. I'm lucky to have these interviews to share.