Lurking, or reading the comments in an online group without writing a comment, is a common practice. But what does it mean to be a lurker?
In this podcast, host Jess Miles speaks with Gina Sipley, Associate Professor of English at SUNY Nassau Community College and author of Just Here for the Comments. Gina challenges our assumptions about lurking, revealing it to be a complex and valuable form of online engagement.
They talk about the psychology of online behaviour, how lurking can be a form of resistance and social activism and the surprising value lurking brings to the world.
Listen to the podcast here, or on your favourite podcast platform:
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
Just Here for the Comments is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £24.99.
Gina Sipley is Associate Professor of English at SUNY Nassau Community College. Sipley is a first-generation college graduate. Follow her on Twitter: @GSipley.
SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
1:09 – Where did the title, ‘Just Here for the Comments’, come from?
2:19 – Who did you study, and on what platforms?
8:30 – Why does lurking have such a bad rep?
11:35 – What grassroot actions are lurkers taking, and how does it challenge traditional ideas of online participation and activism?
17:56 – Lurking as a privileged act
20:11 – What value does lurking bring?
23:36 – Who would you like to read the book, and what impact do you hope it will have?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
Jess Miles: Welcome back to the Transforming Society podcast. I’m your host, Jess Miles, and in today’s episode, we’re exploring online engagement and lurking. We may not think it as we scroll through social media without engaging but lurking can actually be a political act and a site of resistance. Reading’s not neutral, so even if we’re not creating or commenting, our online behaviors make a difference.
To find out more, we’re speaking to Gina Sipley, associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Nassau Community College. Gina’s new book, ‘Just Here for the Comments’, challenges conventional perspectives on online participation and invites us to rethink the ways we understand and value passive engagement in digital spaces. Gina’s is a fresh perspective on online engagement, using the concept of digital literacy to explore empowerment, resistance, inclusion and representation.
Hello, Gina.
Gina Sipley: Hello. Thank you so much for having me today.
JM: No, pleasure. I know it’s quite early in the morning there in New York, so very happy you’ve taken the time to speak to us. So just before we get into it, the title of the book is really familiar. Where did you get that from?
GS: Well, it’s an allusion to a rather popular meme that has been circulating on the Internet for several years. And it’s- the title of the meme is just here for the comments. So sometimes there are variations on it that say things like, ‘Don’t mind me, I’m just here for the comments.’ But the controlling image is always popcorn. It’s usually Michael Jackson from the Thriller video eating popcorn.
It’s a cat with sunglasses on, eating popcorn and it’s the type of thing that we see populate commenting threads when things get spicy in the conversation. When folks like to signal that they are following the thread just because they want to read the comments.
JM: I got. It’s familiar. Yeah. And I actually really like the way you use memes throughout the book to kind of illustrate your point. It’s really clever, really smart. My other question is, before we get into like the findings of the research, who did you study and on what platforms? Because it feels like it must be a really challenging thing to capture experiences of lurkers when they’re not obviously doing anything.
GS: Absolutely. And I think that, you know, the initial focus of my research was on Facebook groups and I looked at neighborhood Facebook groups in particular because they illuminate a very interesting demographic. Most of the folks, not all, but most of the folks in a neighborhood Facebook group know each other in real life offline. And that allowed for an ability to understand what was happening offline while folks were reading the online content.
I then from there looked at online health groups. So groups that Facebook groups where people gather to learn about an illness that they themselves might have or that a loved one might have. I interviewed moderators from a group that I pseudonymised in the book as like an alliance group where the perspective was trying to fight racial injustice. And by starting with Facebook groups and, you know, Facebook being probably the geriatric social media at this point, but also, you know, one of the preliminary points for everyday folks online.
JM: So you would speak to people about like what they did when they were reading, and it’s about the practice of reading, isn’t it, in these contexts?
GS: Sure. So I started with community mapping. So community mapping is a qualitative practice where you, you know, let the group know that you’re a researcher and that you’re you know, what your research question is and you’re asking the group to participate in an anonymized collaborative effort to map the activity of the group. Essentially, folks are putting sticky notes together.
So I ask questions about what do you do when you’re reading the comments If you’re not publicly sharing that you are reading. So if you’re not liking, you’re not commenting, you’re not sharing the post, what are you doing? And I populated with a few things that I know that I do, and then others through the padlet platform they could like upvote that they themselves are also engaged in those activities.
JM: Okay. Yeah.
GS: And then there was the possibility that they could add a sticky note of their own and say, Well, I do this or I do that, but it’s anonymized so people don’t have to reveal who they are and then I follow that up with this, you know, Thank you, you know, for the data that I was able to gather.
Is anyone willing to speak with me for an extended interview? And I had participants from the groups reach out to me, and I set up extended interviews with those folks to talk to them about the practices that they identified, some of the some of the gratification that they received through lurking. And it was through those interviews that I was able to start to code and see common strands throughout the conversations.
JM: Yeah. Well, can you just give a couple of examples of what the things on the sticky notes were?
GS: Sure. So some of the things that folks say that they did were they saw a post and they it encouraged them to buy a book or read a book, but they didn’t popu- They didn’t post it on the platform.
JM: Okay.
GS: Or some people would say things like I learned something on this platform but I didn’t post it on Facebook, but I went to another platform and I posted or I talked about it there. Or I had an offline conversation with somebody via text message or face to face conversation about something that I read online and what starts to evolve is this nest of activity or that is occurring but is not captured publicly by the platform.
So there are all these micro metrics on the back end that the platform can track. You know, how long you hover on something, What part of the page you’re engaged most closely on if it’s a mouse or your finger. We don’t have access to that data as researchers, as just laypeople like, you know, everyday people online. You can see who commented on something or who likes something, but you don’t have access to that back end data.
So what’s interesting about this type of research is it actually gives more data than what the platform can extract, because the platform is just sort of looking at where- they’re trying to measure attention based on either clicking, hovering or, you know, impressions like sort of lightly touching something and bringing it to the surface. And this is this type of qualitative research is digging deeper into those questions of why something pushes us to respond and why we choose not to respond.
And some of that can be temporality like, you know, you’re reading something engaging, but you’re interrupted in your real world life and you you don’t have time to comment or your attention in the real world gets distracted in some way. But some of it is also a very precise and calculated decision based on the the reader or the social media account holder.
JM: It’s such a unique thing to research in that sense, isn’t it? And I want to go on in a little bit to talk about the actions you discovered it made people do, and the impact of those. But first, I mean, I think I think most of us would describe ourselves as lurkers. And I like it when you do at the beginning of the book, and we just say it in a really self-deprecating way.
But why why is it that lurking has such a bad rep? It’s like it’s not seen as a positive thing is it to be a lurker?
GS: I think it has to do with the word itself, and I the chapter, a chapter of my book traces the etymology of the word, and I do some research from the Oxford English Dictionary on the various transformations the word has had over time, because it begins as a rather neutral word in middle English, and then toward the 19th century, it really becomes a term that’s used in opposition to capitalism.
So throughout throughout history, there are these shifts. So at first it’s a very neutral term and then it’s used in poetry to describe, you know, animals that are being tricksters and they are in some way in opposition to the hunter. So it’s got it’s got and it has a quick shift toward anything in opposition to anthropomorphism. But then in the 19th century when you’re looking at Henry Mayhew’s work in London, the labor of the poor, he’s got this sociological project or journalism project where he’s trying to track all of the different types of poverty that exists in Victorian London.
And one subset of people he identifies are the lurkers, and they are people who are very, very poor and they are using very sophisticated literacy skills to try to get alms or try to get donations from folks. And they do things like the pregnant lurk, they pretend to be pregnant or the sick lurk or the shipwreck lurk and and Mayhew describes them as this in the hierarchy of thieves, as at the top, because they’re mostly white and they are are literate to some degree.
And this is cast in a negative light. And when you see the rise of computing in the late 20th century and the Internet as sort of a new option available to a subset of folks with the right, you know, technological skills and capital, lurking starts to get brought up again, but in a very sexualized way and this idea that you want to purchase, you know, from CompuServe a certain device because it’s going to protect you from the lurkers, people who might be listening in on your conversations, you might be having these very private, intimate conversations.
So the lurkers are cast in this very devious way.
JM: I’m interested in this idea of lurking as being something in opposition to capitalism as well. And it’s almost like you’re not quite doing what you’re supposed to be doing in the system somehow. And I think that obviously has negative connotations for all the wrong reasons. And that kind of takes me to my next question, which is that almost like can lurking be participatory and political?
So in the book you talk about how lurking in online spaces can be seen as a form of resistance to dominant power structures like capitalism, I suppose. So what grassroots actions are we taking when we lurk online, and how does the idea challenge traditional notions of online participation and activism?
GS: Sure, absolutely. And I think part of that is reframing or rethinking how we define lurkers.
JM: Yeah.
GS: So it’s not it’s you know, there’s research that shows that 90% of online communication, communication or participation in an online group is lurking. And that’s not original research by me. I’m standing on the shoulders of lots of other scholars Nonnecke, Preece and others who’ve done this initial. But I think sometimes that figure is misunderstood because it’s not that 90% of all people are lurkers.
It’s that in any given platform or any given community, 90% of the activity is lurking. So that as we move or toggle among those different spaces, sometimes we are active and sometimes we are lurkers and I shouldn’t say active, sometimes we are public participants and then some of them.
JM: Because lurkers are active too. Yeah.
GS: And even after doing this research, I still fall back on some of those linguistic-
JM: It’s so embedded, isn’t it? Yeah.
GS: Yeah, it’s absolutely. So thinking about that, lurking can be a very important tool for social activism because perhaps you’re lurking in a particular group and to engage in something that I would call receptive reading. And that’s one of the lurker literacies that I describe in the book. This idea that you’re reading to better understand a divergent point of view. So you’re reading with the purpose that you want to know how someone or a group of someones who think differently from you.
Why they think that way, and how. And engaging in receptive reading is a form of research. So lurking in that context is important to a variety of different social aims. Thinking about the ways that our presence can sometimes signify our compliance. I in interviewing folks, they would say, You know, I realized that I was lurking in a particular group, and the content of that group turned in a anti-Semitic direction.
And I and I didn’t know what I should do because it’s an overwhelming feeling when you encounter something like this online. But through what I describe in the book as participatory restraint. So using text messaging or offline channels face to face with other people discussing like, ‘Hey, I’ve seen this sort of anti-Semitic activity in this group, what is the best way to respond’ and not engaging the platform directly with it, having those conversations offline.
And some folks said, you know, I realized that just by being in the group, it shows that the group has X number of members. The best thing I can do is leave the group. Right. But that decision was made through reading and then offline discussion. So the idea that sometimes the best places to have the discussion are not that specific space.
So understand like when to be a lurker, when to be a participant. And then folks said that realizing how they’re even if they did not comment to the post. So publicly to your peers, your comments would appear. But the fact that you’re hovering on a post would not appear to your peers. However, the platform is registering that you’re hovering and that experience of hovering might feed the algorithm to increase its circulation of this post.
So folks realize that in reading, even if they’re not commenting, they’re sending a message to the platform that this is engaging and this message should be spread. So realizing that when I see something anti-Semitic, if it’s in a group that I need to be in for whatever reason, I’m going to scroll past it. Because even just waiting and reading it and indulging in it is going to perhaps spread that information.
So these are the types of, you know, actions on some level. And also this these last sort of things that I was describing are the process of reflexive entertainment. So reflexive entertainment is when you are approaching content online with the eye toward just being relaxed and having a good time, and then you encounter something that you realize is against your morals or your ethics or is problematic in some way.
And then you have to make a decision about what you’re going to do. Are you going to continue to lurk? Are you going to delurk and engage on the platform?
Or are you going to desist? And you just say, I’m going to leave this site altogether. So trying to figure out what you want your stance to be or your relation to the content that you’re viewing that contributes to sort of sort of the social activism that we can be taking even if we’re not connected to a large activism community.
JM: It’s really interesting because you forget the influence you have even when you don’t feel like you’re doing anything. And I think that, ‘cause sometimes when we scrolling through, something uncomfortable comes up, like, I don’t know, something you politically disagree with, but you’re compelled to look at it and compelled to watch it. But that’s telling the algorithm that you’re interested, isn’t it?
And it’s a good bit of content that they should circulate more. So actually, even if you just stop doing that, you’re making a difference aren’t you?
GS: Right! And of course, you know, at scale we need larger interventions. But yeah, it’s it’s important to see how if 90% of the activity in that group is lurking and a number of folks recognize that their reading engagement matters to the platform, even if it doesn’t matter socially to their… and publicly to their peers, that’s one form of activism that readers can take.
JM: Yeah, it’s interesting. And then also, we’re not ever doing anything really, truly passively are we, so even if we’re not responding then and there in that moment on the platform, it’s quite likely that we will go on to talk about it with someone or to engage with it somewhere else. In the book, you describe the Internet as a colonized space and that lurking is a privileged act.
I thought this was really interesting. So could you talk a little bit more about that?
GS: You know, I think that there- a way to think about this is to look at the example of what we call in the United States food stamps. So essentially coupons or vouchers that folks who are socioeconomically in need can apply for through the government in order to get access to food. And those food stamps require an exchange of a significant amount of personal data, constantly updating your personal data and always sort of being anxious about how your data reporting might in some way restrict your access.
And folks who do not have to rely on food stamps do not have to share personal data to go to the grocery store and buy whatever food choices they choose. And when you think about the Internet, the internet functions in kind of a similar way. Those folks who have robust offline social networks and economic capital do not have to engage.
And when you think about the ways that folks who need to access information, need to ask the question, need to gather information, they turn to those networks online because they don’t have the community based resources and the amount of labor that working class, middle class people have to spend at their jobs means that we don’t have the same time to develop offline social communities that can support us.
We rely on our online communities. And lurking in that sense is an extraordinarily privileged act.
JM: So we’ve established that lurking is active, it is participatory. But as you go through the book, you kind of finish by talking about the value it adds to the world. So having done all this work, what is your opinion on what value lurking brings, if any?
GS: I think it has significant value and the measure of that value depends on the the stance that you’re taking. You know, if you’re a parent of a child with a rare health need and through sense making, which is one of the lurker literacies I describe in the book, you uncover the tools you need to support and advocate for your child.
That’s a win when a platform like Twitch extends profit sharing to creators for Lurk Views, independent content creators receive a more equitable revenue stream.
JM: Because lots of the platforms don’t pay people for lurkers, do they? They only pay people- Yeah, I didn’t realize that until I read the book either.
GS: Yeah. Yeah. So by making visible the contribution that lurkers provide and then profit sharing with those who depend on lurk views, you know, that’s that’s another way to think about its significance. But also just that when you have ideas that social justice ideas that you want to circulate. The first step to activism is sort of like reading, researching, understanding, reflecting, and that’s what we do when we’re lurking.
It can’t stop there. But that’s the first. That’s the first step. But of course, you know, lurking is a form of reading and it’s an ambivalent and neutral action. So it can be used for malevolent purposes. It can be used to… we can read things online and then use that to profit in ways that are maybe moral or unethical.
But it shouldn’t be presumed that that is the motive for reading. And I think we see this with, you know, like when when Twitter moved to X, for example, with that shift, you had to be an account holder in order to lurk on what is now X. So you used to be able to kind of publicly search for tweets.
You can’t really do that anymore and you’re not even able to look at a few, which for a time period that was an option. Now you must be an account holder. And when you’re an account holder, you have to be an account holder at a certain tier to even read an extended number of posts. And those at the higher tier get what X describes as a more streamlined and enjoyable reading experience.
So the platforms know the value that we hold when we are lurking, when we’re reading online, and knowing that we have the potential as as readers to withhold or extend our reading to support the ideas and platforms and businesses and people and communities that we think deserve our attention.
JM: Yeah, that Twitter/X point is really interesting as well in that context of privilege, isn’t it? So if you have to have an account in order to be able to lurk, then that’s another way in which lurking becomes a privileged act. Absolutely, Yeah. I have one more question. You’ve spoken spoken to it a little bit in your answer just there.
But obviously this podcast is called Transforming Society, so we like to talk about the potential of research to transform society. So I just wanted to finish by asking you who you would like to read the book and what impact you hope it will have.
GS: Yes, I’m hoping that academics who engage in qualitative digital research will be interested in it as a prompt to make sure that lurkers presence and participation is included in their research design. You know, if 90% of participants in an online community are lurking and a researcher is conducting a study of online health groups or of, you know, psychological experiences of people on the Internet, and that research design does not include lurkers, then the results could potentially lead to flawed findings because you’re not capturing a full group for a full sample.
And oftentimes researchers will kind of lament like it’s hard to connect with lurkers. And in the last chapter of my book, I describe some of the ways that you can try to engage the lurking population. And one key thing to remember of that is if you know you’re listening and you’re a qualitative researcher, is that it’s not 90% of people that are lurkers, it’s 90% of participants in an online community.
So recruiting on multiple platforms or multiple streams is what’s going to help you find people, because somebody might be very active on another platform, but they’re lurking in the platform that you’re trying to study. So recruiting on a different platform, you can find some of those people. I’m really hoping that folks invested in education, whether it’s like traditional primary, secondary education or spaces like nonprofits and libraries, where there are initiatives for media literacy that folks will take this book.
And I’m in the process of coming up with some, you know, free resources in relation to the book for teachers and for book clubs that discuss the lurker literacies that exist, how to teach about them, how to get folks to sort of interrogate and investigate their stance to the content that they read online.
JM: So when you say the lurker literacies, that’s like the receptive reading, the participatory restraint, those things that you talked about?
GS: Yes. Doing the reflexive entertainment. So and that’s not meant to be the finite amount of literacies. I think that this is the starting point, and hopefully others will take on this research to look at specific demographics and the different platforms that will emerge over time. But at the root of it, we’re really talking about a human liberal arts or humanities approach to thinking about lurking.
So trying to figure out, you know, when I’m in this space and I laugh, who profits from my laughter? At what point does my laughter harm others? So these types of questions that we need to consider as readers and make them a habitual part of our reading practice, because I think so much of the messaging that we get related to social activism is, you know, if you’re if you’re silent, you’re complicit.
But sometimes in these spaces, silence can actually be a mercy. So trying to figure out when, it’s not always, but like when is silence a mercy and when is it that I need to respond and in what venue should I be responding? So understanding those things, I think the way to get that message out is through traditional and nontraditional forms of- I’m sorry, traditional and nontraditional educational venues.
And hopefully from there it becomes a larger discussion that folks engage in.
JM: Yeah, I really hope it does. I think different ways of thinking about activism really, really important because different people do things in different ways and also this is something that kind of one way or another, probably we all do it don’t we. So it’s a real it’s really a broad thing. Thank you so much, Gina, for speaking to us today.
Gina’s book, ‘Just Here for the Comments’, is published by Bristol University Press and is out now. You can find out more on our website, bristoluniversitypress.co.uk. And you can also get 25% off all our books, including Gina’s, by signing up to our mailing list. Thank you for listening. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts.
Thank you, Gina. Really appreciate you giving us your time today. It’s been great.
GS: Thank you. Have a lovely day.
JM: Thank you.
Just Here for the Comments is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £24.99.
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Image credit: Corina Rainer on Unsplash
by Gina Sipley
22nd May 2024
Lurking, or reading the comments in an online group without writing a comment, is a common practice. But what does it mean to be a lurker?
In this podcast, host Jess Miles speaks with Gina Sipley, Associate Professor of English at SUNY Nassau Community College and author of Just Here for the Comments. Gina challenges our assumptions about lurking, revealing it to be a complex and valuable form of online engagement.
They talk about the psychology of online behaviour, how lurking can be a form of resistance and social activism and the surprising value lurking brings to the world.
Listen to the podcast here, or on your favourite podcast platform:
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
Just Here for the Comments is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £24.99.
Gina Sipley is Associate Professor of English at SUNY Nassau Community College. Sipley is a first-generation college graduate. Follow her on Twitter: @GSipley.
SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
1:09 – Where did the title, ‘Just Here for the Comments’, come from?
2:19 – Who did you study, and on what platforms?
8:30 – Why does lurking have such a bad rep?
11:35 – What grassroot actions are lurkers taking, and how does it challenge traditional ideas of online participation and activism?
17:56 – Lurking as a privileged act
20:11 – What value does lurking bring?
23:36 – Who would you like to read the book, and what impact do you hope it will have?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
Jess Miles: Welcome back to the Transforming Society podcast. I’m your host, Jess Miles, and in today’s episode, we’re exploring online engagement and lurking. We may not think it as we scroll through social media without engaging but lurking can actually be a political act and a site of resistance. Reading’s not neutral, so even if we’re not creating or commenting, our online behaviors make a difference.
To find out more, we’re speaking to Gina Sipley, associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Nassau Community College. Gina’s new book, ‘Just Here for the Comments’, challenges conventional perspectives on online participation and invites us to rethink the ways we understand and value passive engagement in digital spaces. Gina’s is a fresh perspective on online engagement, using the concept of digital literacy to explore empowerment, resistance, inclusion and representation.
Hello, Gina.
Gina Sipley: Hello. Thank you so much for having me today.
JM: No, pleasure. I know it’s quite early in the morning there in New York, so very happy you’ve taken the time to speak to us. So just before we get into it, the title of the book is really familiar. Where did you get that from?
GS: Well, it’s an allusion to a rather popular meme that has been circulating on the Internet for several years. And it’s- the title of the meme is just here for the comments. So sometimes there are variations on it that say things like, ‘Don’t mind me, I’m just here for the comments.’ But the controlling image is always popcorn. It’s usually Michael Jackson from the Thriller video eating popcorn.
It’s a cat with sunglasses on, eating popcorn and it’s the type of thing that we see populate commenting threads when things get spicy in the conversation. When folks like to signal that they are following the thread just because they want to read the comments.
JM: I got. It’s familiar. Yeah. And I actually really like the way you use memes throughout the book to kind of illustrate your point. It’s really clever, really smart. My other question is, before we get into like the findings of the research, who did you study and on what platforms? Because it feels like it must be a really challenging thing to capture experiences of lurkers when they’re not obviously doing anything.
GS: Absolutely. And I think that, you know, the initial focus of my research was on Facebook groups and I looked at neighborhood Facebook groups in particular because they illuminate a very interesting demographic. Most of the folks, not all, but most of the folks in a neighborhood Facebook group know each other in real life offline. And that allowed for an ability to understand what was happening offline while folks were reading the online content.
I then from there looked at online health groups. So groups that Facebook groups where people gather to learn about an illness that they themselves might have or that a loved one might have. I interviewed moderators from a group that I pseudonymised in the book as like an alliance group where the perspective was trying to fight racial injustice. And by starting with Facebook groups and, you know, Facebook being probably the geriatric social media at this point, but also, you know, one of the preliminary points for everyday folks online.
JM: So you would speak to people about like what they did when they were reading, and it’s about the practice of reading, isn’t it, in these contexts?
GS: Sure. So I started with community mapping. So community mapping is a qualitative practice where you, you know, let the group know that you’re a researcher and that you’re you know, what your research question is and you’re asking the group to participate in an anonymized collaborative effort to map the activity of the group. Essentially, folks are putting sticky notes together.
So I ask questions about what do you do when you’re reading the comments If you’re not publicly sharing that you are reading. So if you’re not liking, you’re not commenting, you’re not sharing the post, what are you doing? And I populated with a few things that I know that I do, and then others through the padlet platform they could like upvote that they themselves are also engaged in those activities.
JM: Okay. Yeah.
GS: And then there was the possibility that they could add a sticky note of their own and say, Well, I do this or I do that, but it’s anonymized so people don’t have to reveal who they are and then I follow that up with this, you know, Thank you, you know, for the data that I was able to gather.
Is anyone willing to speak with me for an extended interview? And I had participants from the groups reach out to me, and I set up extended interviews with those folks to talk to them about the practices that they identified, some of the some of the gratification that they received through lurking. And it was through those interviews that I was able to start to code and see common strands throughout the conversations.
JM: Yeah. Well, can you just give a couple of examples of what the things on the sticky notes were?
GS: Sure. So some of the things that folks say that they did were they saw a post and they it encouraged them to buy a book or read a book, but they didn’t popu- They didn’t post it on the platform.
JM: Okay.
GS: Or some people would say things like I learned something on this platform but I didn’t post it on Facebook, but I went to another platform and I posted or I talked about it there. Or I had an offline conversation with somebody via text message or face to face conversation about something that I read online and what starts to evolve is this nest of activity or that is occurring but is not captured publicly by the platform.
So there are all these micro metrics on the back end that the platform can track. You know, how long you hover on something, What part of the page you’re engaged most closely on if it’s a mouse or your finger. We don’t have access to that data as researchers, as just laypeople like, you know, everyday people online. You can see who commented on something or who likes something, but you don’t have access to that back end data.
So what’s interesting about this type of research is it actually gives more data than what the platform can extract, because the platform is just sort of looking at where- they’re trying to measure attention based on either clicking, hovering or, you know, impressions like sort of lightly touching something and bringing it to the surface. And this is this type of qualitative research is digging deeper into those questions of why something pushes us to respond and why we choose not to respond.
And some of that can be temporality like, you know, you’re reading something engaging, but you’re interrupted in your real world life and you you don’t have time to comment or your attention in the real world gets distracted in some way. But some of it is also a very precise and calculated decision based on the the reader or the social media account holder.
JM: It’s such a unique thing to research in that sense, isn’t it? And I want to go on in a little bit to talk about the actions you discovered it made people do, and the impact of those. But first, I mean, I think I think most of us would describe ourselves as lurkers. And I like it when you do at the beginning of the book, and we just say it in a really self-deprecating way.
But why why is it that lurking has such a bad rep? It’s like it’s not seen as a positive thing is it to be a lurker?
GS: I think it has to do with the word itself, and I the chapter, a chapter of my book traces the etymology of the word, and I do some research from the Oxford English Dictionary on the various transformations the word has had over time, because it begins as a rather neutral word in middle English, and then toward the 19th century, it really becomes a term that’s used in opposition to capitalism.
So throughout throughout history, there are these shifts. So at first it’s a very neutral term and then it’s used in poetry to describe, you know, animals that are being tricksters and they are in some way in opposition to the hunter. So it’s got it’s got and it has a quick shift toward anything in opposition to anthropomorphism. But then in the 19th century when you’re looking at Henry Mayhew’s work in London, the labor of the poor, he’s got this sociological project or journalism project where he’s trying to track all of the different types of poverty that exists in Victorian London.
And one subset of people he identifies are the lurkers, and they are people who are very, very poor and they are using very sophisticated literacy skills to try to get alms or try to get donations from folks. And they do things like the pregnant lurk, they pretend to be pregnant or the sick lurk or the shipwreck lurk and and Mayhew describes them as this in the hierarchy of thieves, as at the top, because they’re mostly white and they are are literate to some degree.
And this is cast in a negative light. And when you see the rise of computing in the late 20th century and the Internet as sort of a new option available to a subset of folks with the right, you know, technological skills and capital, lurking starts to get brought up again, but in a very sexualized way and this idea that you want to purchase, you know, from CompuServe a certain device because it’s going to protect you from the lurkers, people who might be listening in on your conversations, you might be having these very private, intimate conversations.
So the lurkers are cast in this very devious way.
JM: I’m interested in this idea of lurking as being something in opposition to capitalism as well. And it’s almost like you’re not quite doing what you’re supposed to be doing in the system somehow. And I think that obviously has negative connotations for all the wrong reasons. And that kind of takes me to my next question, which is that almost like can lurking be participatory and political?
So in the book you talk about how lurking in online spaces can be seen as a form of resistance to dominant power structures like capitalism, I suppose. So what grassroots actions are we taking when we lurk online, and how does the idea challenge traditional notions of online participation and activism?
GS: Sure, absolutely. And I think part of that is reframing or rethinking how we define lurkers.
JM: Yeah.
GS: So it’s not it’s you know, there’s research that shows that 90% of online communication, communication or participation in an online group is lurking. And that’s not original research by me. I’m standing on the shoulders of lots of other scholars Nonnecke, Preece and others who’ve done this initial. But I think sometimes that figure is misunderstood because it’s not that 90% of all people are lurkers.
It’s that in any given platform or any given community, 90% of the activity is lurking. So that as we move or toggle among those different spaces, sometimes we are active and sometimes we are lurkers and I shouldn’t say active, sometimes we are public participants and then some of them.
JM: Because lurkers are active too. Yeah.
GS: And even after doing this research, I still fall back on some of those linguistic-
JM: It’s so embedded, isn’t it? Yeah.
GS: Yeah, it’s absolutely. So thinking about that, lurking can be a very important tool for social activism because perhaps you’re lurking in a particular group and to engage in something that I would call receptive reading. And that’s one of the lurker literacies that I describe in the book. This idea that you’re reading to better understand a divergent point of view. So you’re reading with the purpose that you want to know how someone or a group of someones who think differently from you.
Why they think that way, and how. And engaging in receptive reading is a form of research. So lurking in that context is important to a variety of different social aims. Thinking about the ways that our presence can sometimes signify our compliance. I in interviewing folks, they would say, You know, I realized that I was lurking in a particular group, and the content of that group turned in a anti-Semitic direction.
And I and I didn’t know what I should do because it’s an overwhelming feeling when you encounter something like this online. But through what I describe in the book as participatory restraint. So using text messaging or offline channels face to face with other people discussing like, ‘Hey, I’ve seen this sort of anti-Semitic activity in this group, what is the best way to respond’ and not engaging the platform directly with it, having those conversations offline.
And some folks said, you know, I realized that just by being in the group, it shows that the group has X number of members. The best thing I can do is leave the group. Right. But that decision was made through reading and then offline discussion. So the idea that sometimes the best places to have the discussion are not that specific space.
So understand like when to be a lurker, when to be a participant. And then folks said that realizing how they’re even if they did not comment to the post. So publicly to your peers, your comments would appear. But the fact that you’re hovering on a post would not appear to your peers. However, the platform is registering that you’re hovering and that experience of hovering might feed the algorithm to increase its circulation of this post.
So folks realize that in reading, even if they’re not commenting, they’re sending a message to the platform that this is engaging and this message should be spread. So realizing that when I see something anti-Semitic, if it’s in a group that I need to be in for whatever reason, I’m going to scroll past it. Because even just waiting and reading it and indulging in it is going to perhaps spread that information.
So these are the types of, you know, actions on some level. And also this these last sort of things that I was describing are the process of reflexive entertainment. So reflexive entertainment is when you are approaching content online with the eye toward just being relaxed and having a good time, and then you encounter something that you realize is against your morals or your ethics or is problematic in some way.
And then you have to make a decision about what you’re going to do. Are you going to continue to lurk? Are you going to delurk and engage on the platform?
Or are you going to desist? And you just say, I’m going to leave this site altogether. So trying to figure out what you want your stance to be or your relation to the content that you’re viewing that contributes to sort of sort of the social activism that we can be taking even if we’re not connected to a large activism community.
JM: It’s really interesting because you forget the influence you have even when you don’t feel like you’re doing anything. And I think that, ‘cause sometimes when we scrolling through, something uncomfortable comes up, like, I don’t know, something you politically disagree with, but you’re compelled to look at it and compelled to watch it. But that’s telling the algorithm that you’re interested, isn’t it?
And it’s a good bit of content that they should circulate more. So actually, even if you just stop doing that, you’re making a difference aren’t you?
GS: Right! And of course, you know, at scale we need larger interventions. But yeah, it’s it’s important to see how if 90% of the activity in that group is lurking and a number of folks recognize that their reading engagement matters to the platform, even if it doesn’t matter socially to their… and publicly to their peers, that’s one form of activism that readers can take.
JM: Yeah, it’s interesting. And then also, we’re not ever doing anything really, truly passively are we, so even if we’re not responding then and there in that moment on the platform, it’s quite likely that we will go on to talk about it with someone or to engage with it somewhere else. In the book, you describe the Internet as a colonized space and that lurking is a privileged act.
I thought this was really interesting. So could you talk a little bit more about that?
GS: You know, I think that there- a way to think about this is to look at the example of what we call in the United States food stamps. So essentially coupons or vouchers that folks who are socioeconomically in need can apply for through the government in order to get access to food. And those food stamps require an exchange of a significant amount of personal data, constantly updating your personal data and always sort of being anxious about how your data reporting might in some way restrict your access.
And folks who do not have to rely on food stamps do not have to share personal data to go to the grocery store and buy whatever food choices they choose. And when you think about the Internet, the internet functions in kind of a similar way. Those folks who have robust offline social networks and economic capital do not have to engage.
And when you think about the ways that folks who need to access information, need to ask the question, need to gather information, they turn to those networks online because they don’t have the community based resources and the amount of labor that working class, middle class people have to spend at their jobs means that we don’t have the same time to develop offline social communities that can support us.
We rely on our online communities. And lurking in that sense is an extraordinarily privileged act.
JM: So we’ve established that lurking is active, it is participatory. But as you go through the book, you kind of finish by talking about the value it adds to the world. So having done all this work, what is your opinion on what value lurking brings, if any?
GS: I think it has significant value and the measure of that value depends on the the stance that you’re taking. You know, if you’re a parent of a child with a rare health need and through sense making, which is one of the lurker literacies I describe in the book, you uncover the tools you need to support and advocate for your child.
That’s a win when a platform like Twitch extends profit sharing to creators for Lurk Views, independent content creators receive a more equitable revenue stream.
JM: Because lots of the platforms don’t pay people for lurkers, do they? They only pay people- Yeah, I didn’t realize that until I read the book either.
GS: Yeah. Yeah. So by making visible the contribution that lurkers provide and then profit sharing with those who depend on lurk views, you know, that’s that’s another way to think about its significance. But also just that when you have ideas that social justice ideas that you want to circulate. The first step to activism is sort of like reading, researching, understanding, reflecting, and that’s what we do when we’re lurking.
It can’t stop there. But that’s the first. That’s the first step. But of course, you know, lurking is a form of reading and it’s an ambivalent and neutral action. So it can be used for malevolent purposes. It can be used to… we can read things online and then use that to profit in ways that are maybe moral or unethical.
But it shouldn’t be presumed that that is the motive for reading. And I think we see this with, you know, like when when Twitter moved to X, for example, with that shift, you had to be an account holder in order to lurk on what is now X. So you used to be able to kind of publicly search for tweets.
You can’t really do that anymore and you’re not even able to look at a few, which for a time period that was an option. Now you must be an account holder. And when you’re an account holder, you have to be an account holder at a certain tier to even read an extended number of posts. And those at the higher tier get what X describes as a more streamlined and enjoyable reading experience.
So the platforms know the value that we hold when we are lurking, when we’re reading online, and knowing that we have the potential as as readers to withhold or extend our reading to support the ideas and platforms and businesses and people and communities that we think deserve our attention.
JM: Yeah, that Twitter/X point is really interesting as well in that context of privilege, isn’t it? So if you have to have an account in order to be able to lurk, then that’s another way in which lurking becomes a privileged act. Absolutely, Yeah. I have one more question. You’ve spoken spoken to it a little bit in your answer just there.
But obviously this podcast is called Transforming Society, so we like to talk about the potential of research to transform society. So I just wanted to finish by asking you who you would like to read the book and what impact you hope it will have.
GS: Yes, I’m hoping that academics who engage in qualitative digital research will be interested in it as a prompt to make sure that lurkers presence and participation is included in their research design. You know, if 90% of participants in an online community are lurking and a researcher is conducting a study of online health groups or of, you know, psychological experiences of people on the Internet, and that research design does not include lurkers, then the results could potentially lead to flawed findings because you’re not capturing a full group for a full sample.
And oftentimes researchers will kind of lament like it’s hard to connect with lurkers. And in the last chapter of my book, I describe some of the ways that you can try to engage the lurking population. And one key thing to remember of that is if you know you’re listening and you’re a qualitative researcher, is that it’s not 90% of people that are lurkers, it’s 90% of participants in an online community.
So recruiting on multiple platforms or multiple streams is what’s going to help you find people, because somebody might be very active on another platform, but they’re lurking in the platform that you’re trying to study. So recruiting on a different platform, you can find some of those people. I’m really hoping that folks invested in education, whether it’s like traditional primary, secondary education or spaces like nonprofits and libraries, where there are initiatives for media literacy that folks will take this book.
And I’m in the process of coming up with some, you know, free resources in relation to the book for teachers and for book clubs that discuss the lurker literacies that exist, how to teach about them, how to get folks to sort of interrogate and investigate their stance to the content that they read online.
JM: So when you say the lurker literacies, that’s like the receptive reading, the participatory restraint, those things that you talked about?
GS: Yes. Doing the reflexive entertainment. So and that’s not meant to be the finite amount of literacies. I think that this is the starting point, and hopefully others will take on this research to look at specific demographics and the different platforms that will emerge over time. But at the root of it, we’re really talking about a human liberal arts or humanities approach to thinking about lurking.
So trying to figure out, you know, when I’m in this space and I laugh, who profits from my laughter? At what point does my laughter harm others? So these types of questions that we need to consider as readers and make them a habitual part of our reading practice, because I think so much of the messaging that we get related to social activism is, you know, if you’re if you’re silent, you’re complicit.
But sometimes in these spaces, silence can actually be a mercy. So trying to figure out when, it’s not always, but like when is silence a mercy and when is it that I need to respond and in what venue should I be responding? So understanding those things, I think the way to get that message out is through traditional and nontraditional forms of- I’m sorry, traditional and nontraditional educational venues.
And hopefully from there it becomes a larger discussion that folks engage in.
JM: Yeah, I really hope it does. I think different ways of thinking about activism really, really important because different people do things in different ways and also this is something that kind of one way or another, probably we all do it don’t we. So it’s a real it’s really a broad thing. Thank you so much, Gina, for speaking to us today.
Gina’s book, ‘Just Here for the Comments’, is published by Bristol University Press and is out now. You can find out more on our website, bristoluniversitypress.co.uk. And you can also get 25% off all our books, including Gina’s, by signing up to our mailing list. Thank you for listening. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts.
Thank you, Gina. Really appreciate you giving us your time today. It’s been great.
GS: Thank you. Have a lovely day.
JM: Thank you.
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Image credit: Corina Rainer on Unsplash
by Gina Sipley
22nd May 2024
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