Book Review of <i>Needy Media: How Tech Gets Personal</i> by Stephen Monteiro Stephen Monteiro, <i>Needy media: How tech gets personal</i> . McGill-Queen's University Press: Montreal, Canada, 2025; 240 pp.: ISBN: 9780228025986.

How Tech Gets Personal explores users' overreliance on networked personal media.The author, Stephen Monteiro, places particular emphasis on mobile media devices as companions that, for many people, are always with them.He claims that because of this, our devices' data and the algorithms that support their operations are able to accumulate more information about us than we realize, possibly generating insights about us that even close friends and family do not know.To make this case, Monteiro draws from different disciplines, including anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and cultural studies.He explores how media might dictate our moods, replace human interaction, give us a false sense of control, and fuel an addiction to technology and being online.Monteiro argues that in order to get back to so-called "normalcy" and restore human connection and communication, users must first be aware of the control that these devices have and work toward a solution that includes balance.Chapter 1, "Building the 'Perfectly' Personal," traces digital intimacy to micro and personal computers.According to Monteiro, having a small, portable, and customizable personal computer created a reliance on technological interaction over face-to-face communication with others.In the mid-1970s, when computers were welcomed into homes, computational technology began shifting toward personalization and away from generalization.Moreover, these technologies began to develop what felt like personalized responses, creating the perception that the computer knew certain things about the user and contributing to the feeling of being intertwined with the device.This chapter emphasizes that close relationships with technology and digitally mediated relationships are not a new phenomenon, even though they are often treated as such.The subsequent chapters, Chapters 2 through 6, explore the factors contributing to a seeming "obsession" with personal media and specifically mobile phones.Monteiro argues that we feel increasingly close to phones and other personal devices, owing to such features as proximity, facial recognition, automated responses, algorithms,