The discreet thrill of lurking online
After four years of practice, I discovered I was lurking: Aside from sharing snapshots with friends on a private Instagram page, I was consuming strangers’ social media content without ever posting or commenting on it myself. You’d think someone who relied on and enjoyed these conversations would add to it – report that she, too, made the chocolate lava cake in cans, or that hyperbaric chambers can work wonders after surgery. But no. Even though I enjoy others connecting over the internet, I remain a confirmed lurker. I’ll hit a heart icon and contribute some likes, but I find the public nature of social media participation too performative for me. In the online world, where anyone can put themselves on stage, I like to sit in the audience and applaud.
I started lurking the year before Covid. I worked two office jobs (one as an editor at a design firm, another as an editor-in-chief at a magazine), in addition to writing freelance stories and commuting between my San Francisco apartment and my then-boyfriend’s. home in Oakland. I was always moving between meetings and modes of transportation, and I never had enough time for anything, including exercising or preparing meals. Consequently, it felt like the walls of my pants were getting closer. So I broke open the WeightWatchers app.
In addition to tools used to track diet and exercise, I had something I didn’t expect: an in-app Instagram of sorts, accessible only to members. At that point, the shine of social media was gone for me. I was over the feelings of comparison, the awkward echo chambers. But connect, as the platform was called, was something else.
Unlike my other feeds, it wasn’t a pool of people I knew because they fell into my geographic region, field of work, or socioeconomic class. These were people united by a common problem. The coastal elites, Midwestern farmers, Floridians, doctors, former college athletes. People who loved Trump. People who hated him. People who really wanted to remind you that we were only talking about losing weight. It was a community full of random people I’d probably never meet in real life, telling stories about trying their best — and cheerleaders in the comments that accompanied them.
Connect turned out to be a gateway drug. I would find myself digging into the comments New York people, an Instagram account chronicling the lives of the townspeople, and Post Secret, which encourages people to send anonymous postcards detailing the intimacies of their lives. I followed long strings of comments at the end of online recipes and absorbed the inside jokes Zillow has gone wild, who shares the craziest houses on the real estate platform. Not to mention long back-and-forths “Am I the bastard?” posts on Reddit.