Book Review - Amateurs: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters by Joanna Walsh

Joanna Walsh (2025). Amateurs: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters

Book review by Eilís Nolan

Joanna Walsh’s Amateurs: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters (2025) discusses the online amateur; a nebulous term that Walsh spends a chunk of the introduction (and remainder of the book) defining. Labelling herself as an amateur from the beginning, Walsh defines being a conventional amateur in many ways: “unpaid, or not paid at a professional rate,” “enthusiastic,” “ungoverned by workplace standards,” “unqualified,” “unprofessional.” (11) However, she clarifies, now the internet has made everyone amateurs in varying, unconventional ways. Walsh looks at how digital spaces render the boundaries between amateurism and professionalism nebulous and ambiguous, to see what happens when the internet renders professionals as amateurs and amateurs as professionals. Looking at forms of art that don’t follow the prescriptive formalism that defines art as art offline, she asks what happens when an online artefact “doesn’t call itself art at all.” (13)

Across nine distinct chapters covering a broad area of internet culture, Walsh examines

what it means to be an amateur in an age where amateurism is commodified and

disseminated in an increasingly online culture. Each chapter is prefaced by a year of the

21st century, where the subject matter began to proliferate online. After introducing the

readers to amateurism in the opening chapter, “2007: Our Aesthetic LOLcats”

re-introduces the heart of late-2000s meme culture, the cat, as a case study for digital

ownership and the commodification of memes as units of cultural information. “2011: The

Old Aesthetic” discusses James Bridle’s term “The New Aesthetic” in the context of early

Tumblr “aesthetic” culture, before jettisoning into a deconstruction of the term “your

mom,” in so much as it operates as a signifier of and placeholder reciprocal for aesthetic

ignorance. “2001: Decuperation Loops” talks about repetition and recursion in the digital

age, from looping videos and GIFs to participatory, memetic forum posting. “2023: The

SunDALL·E Painters of the Internet” unpacks criticism of AI art and tools such as

OpenAI’s DALL·E in the context of aesthetic pleasure and deconstructing the aesthetics of

reality. “2014: Selfies” is a combination of three essays: “Book Lovers: Literary

Necrophilia in the Twenty-First Century,” which discusses autobiography and the notion

of “narcissistic” writing; “Cute Suite,” which discusses influencers and the aesthetic of

“cute”; and “DEAD SITES” which discusses screen death and the continued existence of

the online self after death. “2020: Wikidentities” centres around the “Aesthetics Wiki” and

the representations of academic aesthetics such as “dark academia” that proliferate in

online subcultures as a performance of academic professionalism. “2015: In Praise of the

Trash Essay” invokes discourse surrounding the online essay or blog post, defined by

Walsh with regards to her own work as “meet-cute between autofiction and lifestyle

journalism, threesoming with activism, chicklit and critical theory.” (184) “2025:

Resistance is Useless” closes the book out with a final lament to the loss of Twitter

(renamed “X” by Elon Musk) as a space for amateurs to proliferate, and a reflection on the

internet as a platform for amateurism during late-stage capitalism.

Walsh’s core hypothesis is laid out from the beginning: that the internet has made us all

amateurs. She defines this in two senses. The internet has made us amateurs because we

outsource skills to web platforms rather than gaining proficiency ourselves; but also, that

the internet has bred a culture of “professionalised amateurism,” where people take on

roles in online communities or on online platforms. To do this, Walsh has employed a

broad interdisciplinary methodology of consulting the works of renowned philosophers,

such as Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, contemporary academics in cultural studies,

such as Sianne Ngai, and internet amateurs and forums from TikTok user @cosyfaerie to

the anonymous users of /pol on 4chan. This methodology exemplifies Walsh’s thesis

statement by weighing the contributions of amateurs and professionals alike in the

discourse around growing internet culture. As Walsh herself claims, she too is an amateur;

established in her field as an academic, but also somebody who, like everyone else in the

age of the internet, assumes multiple roles, titles, hobbies, jobs online.

Walsh successfully argues her case to render amateurism a subject for academic and

professional discussion. While the area covered seems broad, it is necessitated by the

internet, and, at times, incomprehensibly broad work of cultural information, being the core

subject of discussion. It also highlights the broad applicability of the hypothesis across

these different elements and microcosms of internet culture. Walsh dissects each area of

internet culture thoroughly through the lens of amateurism, rendering it the common

thread that links LOLcats to Rancière to the aesthetics of Gwyneth Paltrow’s “Goop” to

the Frankfurt School. By using the framework of the amateur, Walsh highlights a certain

precarity that comes with online existence, similar to that of the non-professional labourer.

The internet is built off the precarious labour of those of us who inhabit it, and that

habitation is only permitted by those who control what we have come to dub “digital

spaces,” but also by the continued enjoyment value gained out of amateur labour.

Walsh’s text is a worthwhile addition to the still developing field of digital cultural theory,

that grows increasingly more relevant to broader cultural studies. The book is relevant to

postgraduate researchers and established academics to both bolster their understanding of

digital cultures and to provide academic grounding for thoughts or observations they have

had as likely amateurs themselves. It is also accessible for undergraduate students

conducting research in media studies related disciplines. Additionally, cited texts and

scholars used by Walsh in this text provide a concise list of further reading for those

interested in the subject matter, and the groundwork for using the texts in contexts outside

perhaps what was initially intended by their authors prior to the advent of the digital age.

Walsh’s writing is largely accessible and clear, though some of the more discipline specific

references and citations may push this text out of the comfort zone of casual readers

without a background in media studies. Ultimately, the contribution this text makes to the

field should cement it as a necessary text for those undergoing academic research in the

field, and her establishment of a framework for defining amateurism in an age where it is

increasingly commodified will pave the way for further research into this phenomenon as

it, likely, continues to develop.

Byline:

Eilís Nolan is an assistant lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, in Dublin, Ireland. She is currently a PhD researcher as part of the co-supervisory agreement between IADT and Maynooth University, where her doctoral research investigates COVID-19 residue in visual and digital culture.