What type of lurker are you?

Michelle Santiago Cortés considers two recent presentations about online visibility.

Despite its promise of dark lawlessness and constant reinvention, certain rules seem to impose order onto the way the internet works: There is Rule 34, from 4chan, which states that if it exists, “or can be imagined,” there is internet porn for it. The children of the 2010s were warned that the internet is forever, and that nothing can ever be actually deleted once it’s online. But my favorite rule, the least sensationalist of this series, is the 90-9-1 rule, which stipulates that online communities are made up 1% of creators, 9% of contributors, and the rest are lurkers. 

On November 9th, Rhizome, a non-profit with a focus on the preservation of born-digital art, joined forces with Trust, a self-described “network of utopian conspirators” based out of Discord and Berlin, to present a cross-disciplinary review of lurking-related literature, the six types of lurkers, and an original quiz to help you discover: What kind of lurker are you? Rhizome’s Community Designer, Muein, led the presentation about lurking-related literature, covering a range of digital communities like Wikipedia, medical peer-groups, and online classrooms.

A lurker, they explained, is “a non-public participant who feels as engaged lurking in some places as they do contributing to others.” The internet is a superhighway of nonstop content teeming with bots, catfishers, influencers, shitposters, and shoppers. But for every person (or entity) that makes or shares something, it is said that there are 90 others who just…watch. And if they are watching, maybe they are the ideal people to become the librarians and record-keepers of the internet.

Muein explained that the work of the lurker (or as a stream commenter said: “lurker-bees”) is misunderstood because it’s not easily traceable or even conventionally productive, however, “actions in taking information have reactions, [outputs] of information that traverse among and between networks both online and IRL.” Because their actions are virtually invisible, lurkers are often typecast as “freeloaders” or “leeches'' and their perceived inaction is seen as indifference or disapproval. But researchers are beginning to recast lurkers as “peripheral learners” or the “silent majority,” with a strong bond to the communities they regularly lurk. Muein reports that some researchers found that lurkers tend to follow “a more-than-average amount of content from a diverse range of potential sources.”

Lurkers are the readers and listeners of the internet. They might not be its protagonists, but they are the audiences and witnesses. Referring to an earlier conversation they had with co-presenter Leïth Benkhedda (from Support), Muein talked about what the internet would look like if it were full of only bots preoccupied with talking to each other, “and I feel like that’s the internet with no lurkers.”

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“A gimlet-eyed satirist of the cultural morasses and political impasses of our times” (Alexandra Kleeman), Lexi Freiman speaks in The Book of Ayn not only to a particular millennial loneliness, but also to a timeless existential predicament: the strangeness, absurdity, and hilarity of seeking meaning in the modern world.

There are so many reasons to lurk: maybe you’re studying the community to jump in later (Social Lurker); maybe you’re doing research (Knowledge Lurker); maybe you have a crush on but desire zero contact with who you’re lurking (Parasocial Lurking); maybe you feel like anything you would want to contribute, someone else already did (Proxy Lurker); maybe you’re only there to self-promote (Opportunity Lurker); maybe you love the scroll (Pleasure Lurker); or perhaps you actually don’t know what the fuck you’re doing (Structural Lurker). After taking a quiz developed by the folks over at Support and selecting, “I prefer to make moves in silence” I learned I was a Privacy Lurker: “You lurk to protect yourself from observers.”

If you lurk IRL, people can see you lurking and people know when and by whom they are being seen–the context is almost entirely visible to all parties involved. Online, there is no such exchange, you can only see what I show you and if I use the right tools, you won’t even know I’m there. Thinking first about how people relate to prosthetic limbs (but also writing about technology in general) Sarah Hendren’s What Can A Body Do, considers how “these objects together don’t add up to a replacement limb; instead, in aggregate, they extend her reach.” In Victorian England, the proliferation of cameras and the ghostly apparitions (likely rendered through accidents of long exposure times) produced an enthusiastic genre of spirit photography, which claimed to use the camera to extend our mortal gaze into the supernatural realm. Internet lurkers today benefit from a similarly extended reach, in fact, I have to wonder if it’s even possible to lurk without technological mediation–even if it’s a set of binoculars.

Muein’s lurker presentation cites Danah Boyd to explain that “the people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power.” The Guggenheim Museum in New York is currently showing the work of 28 artists, including three new commissions, as part of its new exhibition Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility. The show mostly consists of works by established artists like Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, and Faith Ringgold that address, in the words of the press release, “pressing questions around what it means to be seen, not seen, or erased in society.” Many of the works play with the obscuring powers of chroma key green (“green-screen-green”) and darkness in all-black paintings of low-exposure photography. These artists are playing with different technologies–paint, photography, editing software–in order to limit, redirect, or determine our visual reach. If we absolutely must sign in with our real names, connect our phone numbers, or verify our profiles with pictures, these works seem to offer a list of ways you can hide in plain sight.

A long pole extends from the Guggenheim’s oculus down into the museum’s rotunda; it's attached to a shiny black orb that hovers just across from the back-facing figures of Lorna Simpson’s Time Piece (1990). The hanging orb is one half of American Artist’s site-specific installation, Security Theatre (2023). The other half of the installation is behind a curtain and requires you surrender your phone to a locked pouch that you have to carry down to the lobby to open.

I won’t say too much about the second half of the installation because I liked not knowing what was behind the curtain. As a newly diagnosed “privacy lurker,” I know technology is just as good at redirecting and obscuring as it is at finding and illuminating. Being a lurker is about hiding behind layers of shadows, pseudonyms, cartoon avatars, silence, and other tactics of concealment. As I sat in front of the second half of Security Theatre, I mindlessly clawed at the fabric bag that was locked with my phone inside. It was amazing and I felt like a total creep. In American Artist’s Security Theater, we all take turns on stage.

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• Karlie Kloss bought i-D (Business of Fashion)

• Gwyneth Paltrow Ski Trial Musical to Debut in London (Variety)

• A Tokyo fashion festival trying to revitalize Japanese retail (Vogue Business)

• Rare Beauty is opening its community to the public on Try Your Best, a play-to-earn community platform for brands. (TYB)

• David Zaslav, Warner Brothers Discovery chief, said the striking writers were “right about almost everything” (Hollywood Reporter)

• Mano Sundaresan reviews che’s new Crueger EP for Pitchfork

• Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy are backing a new sports league that's reinventing golf as high-energy, made-for-TV entertainment (Wired)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Holly Herndon’s Infinite Art, a profile on a must-know artist and musician using machine learning (New Yorker)

• As part of N+1’s Bookmatch, you can take a 30-question quiz in exchange for a customized list of 10 book recommendations. All you have to do is donate, even if it’s $1.

• Okkyung Lee is a phenomenal contemporary cellist and she made a list of Korean pop songs that were blacklisted in the 1970s (nts.live)

• Maya S. Cade (creator of the Black Film Archive) wrote about Lena Horne for The Cut

• A brief history of Carpet’s Many Comebacks (Dwell)

• In defense of cold plunges (Guardian)

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