‘LURKER’ LITERACIES: LIVING IN/THROUGH NEIGHBORHOOD FACEBOOK GROUPS

Although mythologized as a fringe or deviant behavior, ‘lurking,’ or passive participation in an online group, has become a regular part of the way we lead our lives online. In a discussion with Jenkins and Ito (2016), danah boyd questions the current emphasis on active online participation. She posits two salient questions: “Can someone be a valuable and participatory lurker?” and “What does high quality listening look like?”(Jenkins, Itō, & boyd, 2016, p.112). From a literacy studies perspective, “high quality listening” is a metaphor for reading, and reading is a highly active process. In Facebook groups, an optional feature for people to virtually gather around a common interest, where membership can be measured in the thousands, it is far more common to ‘lurk’, then it is to respond in words, shares, likes, memes, or emoji to content we have read.