Lurking With Caution

Social Media Stalking & Knowing People in Parts

Still from Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

My mom says that when I was born I weirdly wasn’t screaming. According to her, I emerged eyes blinking wide, mouth agape, and in her words, “taking in” the hospital room surroundings with great interest. I’m sure there’s a perfectly scientific reason for this, and I doubt my pea-sized “brain” could think anything other than rudimentary impulses. But the more poetic side of me might say that I’ve always had a keen interest in observation and introspection. That explanation would certainly clarify many of my early internet habits, as I was not a contributor to the online party, but a frequenter. Too shy to speak up, but perceptive and invested enough to jot down notes to store away in my mental filing cabinet for later.

Given how much I’ve written about the platform and the fact that I’m a blogger today, it might surprise some to know that I never had a Tumblr blog. Sometimes it surprises me, considering how absorbed I was in the Tumblr-centric internet culture of the 2010s. I didn’t create and promote my own blog because I was highly concerned with how others would perceive me and feared that expressing my thoughts, desires, and aesthetic preferences would somehow make me more vulnerable to judgment, and thus harm. Though I didn’t produce content, I absorbed much of the digital movement at the time, playing the deceptively active part of spectator.

In her essay “What type of lurker are you?”, Michelle Santiago Cortés describes the 90-9-1 internet rule, which stipulates that the internet is composed of 1% creators, 9% intermittent contributors, and 90% lurkers. For every one person who actively publishes material online, about ninety people are watching - eyes silently surveilling like an alligator in its swamp. Lurkers have developed the reputation of being “freeloaders” in some online communities. In reality, the role they comprise is invaluable to the existence of such communities to begin with. As with any great artist, an online creator’s work is often sustained - materially and symbolically - through consumption - in silent shares off and online and quietly kept but strongly held bonds to an online group, which keeps it a group all along. Devoting their time to observation rather than creation, Cortés posits that lurkers may be “the ideal people to become the librarians and record-keepers of the internet.” Perhaps the ones who sat back and took it all in are best equipped to reflect on how the internet was and is.

Notably, we don’t just lurk in the large-scale, public sense - on stan Twitter, on Tumblr blogs, on Reddit threads. We aren’t just silent fans of big producers. We also lurk in the interpersonal realm - prowling the pages of former acquaintances, crushes, and friends of friends. All it takes is a name and a potential mutual connection to find someone’s Instagram profile. From there, you can acquire more information about a person than is explicitly stated. A browse through one’s tagged photos, following list, and comments section can reveal many details: which high school they attended, what sports they grew up playing, if they’ve had any serious romantic partners, if anyone close to them has passed away, etc. We can then ascertain whether one tends to be more shy or extraverted, sensitive or hardened, artistic or analytical. We can map out how they decided to attend a university and trace their expressed passions, correlating them to their selected major. We can even narrow down which neighborhood of New York City they likely live in. After a thorough lurking session, we’re left with an effective schematic of a person - a police sketch of one’s life, using the details at our disposal to create a composite character.

As many tend to do, I embarked on a Great Post-Grad Unfollowing Spree after graduating high school. This didn’t happen all at once and I can’t say I thought too deeply about who I decided to sever digital ties with - my “follower”-to-“following” ratio was, embarrassingly, of primary concern. Most of the people I still follow today are people I was friends with or friendly with at some point. A smaller fraction comprises people whose lives are vastly different than mine on paper in some capacity. People who moved to another continent following graduation, who joined the military, who got married and had kids within a year of matriculating. Many of these people also share quite a bit about their lives on social media - which is how I know these details. Perhaps it’s the degree to which their lives appear to differ from mine or the extent of their online vulnerability, but regardless, I feel quite invested in knowing what’s going on with them. Yet, considering I haven’t talked to them in years, my investment is more akin to engagement with reality TV characters. I’m obsessed with the idiosyncrasies of otherwise “normal” people, with reading the rhythm of their lives through my screen and interpreting their patterns.

I’ve heard many college students joke online about their campus “celebrities” - perfectly normal individuals that they and their friends get excited about spotting on campus for some reason. These are typically random, eccentric people you’ve had one or two interactions with at a party or in passing, whose sightings in the dining hall or the quad call for a dorm room debrief. You won’t believe who I saw in the gym: [INSERT NAME HERE]! My friends and I certainly had these types of people. 

Similarly, the former hometown acquaintances I still follow on Instagram often have a recurring cast of individuals on their grid - a husband, a baby, a new roommate. When I see these mutual connections in real life, it’s an even more personal kind of “celebrity” sighting. When I was home for the holidays in December, I spotted the husband of a former classmate who probably doesn’t even remember my name. The knowledge that I unwillingly have of this person and their life flooded my brain - where they vacationed that summer, what their dog’s name is. I almost felt compelled to say something. “Oh that’s-” I almost exclaimed to my sisters. I stopped myself, wondering how I would explain. I don’t actually know this person, and they certainly don’t know me. 

Cortés suggests that technological mediation is usually necessary for lurking, even if it’s technology as elementary as a pair of binoculars. Social media has certainly become one of the most advanced pieces of lurking tech. There’s so little sleuthing involved when people voluntarily offer so much information. If you’re active on apps like Instagram, you almost can’t help but know so much about someone. The amount of knowledge that I have about total strangers can leave a bad taste in my mouth. To see someone in a grocery store and know intimate details about them while they couldn’t pick me out of a crowd makes me feel a weird sense of unfounded power.

This unspoken absorption of knowledge even has ways of impacting my active friendships. I can know what my friend has been up to based on the updates on their “close friends” story, or that month’s photo dump. Others offer “life update” posts on their Instagram grids, which mimic mass, group chat texts, sharing where they’ve moved, what job they’ve started, and more. This type of post likely has a direct relationship to the multi-paragraph, intimate information dissemination that famously occurs on Facebook. I understand the function of this type of post, particularly when you have a big family and community that you want to share meaningful life updates with, but don’t have the time to text or call people individually. It serves a valuable purpose. 

Nonetheless, the mass social media update feels a bit impersonal. It’s not dyadic, it’s not interpersonal communication. When I meet a friend for lunch the weekend following such a post, I already have an idea of what they’re going to tell me. There’s typically room for further discussion and elaboration, but less opportunity for surprise and intrigue when it’s all already out there. It can feel awkward to ask when so much is already silently known.

The amount of information about others available to us on social media creates a rift in the typical social experience. This impacts the generation below me the most, which contains many children who didn’t experience a world before smartphones. My younger sisters and their friends have peers that they sit next to in class that they only know through social media lurking and blank Snapchats. These people are “friends” to them, but they may not have even exchanged more than twenty words in person. The knowledge they have of one another is a Frankensteinian mosaic that they glued together via close social media viewing. Via reading between the lines of tagged photos and interpreting the punctuation of Instagram captions. They attempt to make a whole out of mere parts of a person. And to know somebody in parts, isn’t to know them completely.

I suppose this isn’t a totally new phenomenon - people have known others in parts for a long time, fashioning personalities in their heads based on rumors and observations. Gossiping, watching, and partially knowing another is a long-held part of our social script. Not all of our connections must be close, personal ones - having casually known acquaintances bolsters the sense that we’re a part of something bigger than our immediate circle. Technological advancement and online vulnerability are simply making it easier to maintain acquaintances from a greater distance and in increasingly disparate parts. As such, it’s also progressively common to make larger assumptions based on fewer pieces of information. 

Take dating apps, for instance. We’re given a self-made snapshot of a person - what in their eyes would be the ideal end schematic following a thorough lurking session - and draw our conclusions from there. We’re somehow given so much information about people up front, and yet, are missing so many details altogether. Not the broad strokes, but the smaller, less discernible details - the fine points that when left out, turn someone from a complex human being into a flattened, more singular identity. 

Obviously, it doesn’t make sense to divulge all of our secrets on a Hinge or Instagram profile - that would be ill-advised. There’s just a satisfying sense of mystery and curiosity that we miss out on when we assume we have all the answers to someone’s life. And conversely, there’s an aspect of connection we lose when we keep all of our own matters further from our vests. I’m often more fulfilled hearing about what’s happening in my friends’ lives directly from them - even if it’s just over text. Even just following up with someone one-on-one about a personal update they shared on social media offers a more pleasing feeling of connection than passively observing and musing about their life. I’m able to fill in the cracks of my mosaic with the nuance that the internet doesn’t afford at times. 

But then again, I would be admittedly discontented if my hometown celebrities stopped divulging as much as they do. Snooping, observing, and lurking is a human tendency, certainly made smoother through more pervasive personal technology and a more open attitude about sharing online. It’s amusing to think that I, a whole person, could be a character - a sideshow attraction - in someone else’s life as much as they could be in mine - but it’s a reality. In such a case, we ought to capitalize on the moments where connection is possible, knowing that the lurking will likely occur regardless.

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