Lurkers Unite!

Virginia Heffernan wrote a nifty essay about the joys of lurking in this Sunday's NYTimes Magazine. The first paragraph alone just killed me:

For years, I’ve spent hours a day on Web sites devoted variously to television, finance, consumer electronics, celebrity gossip, furniture design, health anomalies and real estate. To the sites’ message boards, which I follow almost as avidly as I did the first seasons of “Damages” and “Mad Men,” I’ve contributed a total of three overwritten comments. I can recall them verbatim. They sank like stones.

I am also an inveterate lurker from way back. My first experiences lurking online were on ISCABBS--the telnet-based bulletin board system run by a student computing group at the U of Iowa. Like Virginia Heffernan, I remained mostly silent on there, as everything I said fell flat. I was roundly ignored on ISCABBS, and this by people who I pretty much chose to roundly ignore in real life. How fitting.

And now? The Web is a virtual cornucopia of lurking opportunities, isn't it? This blog is essentially the first time that I have felt comfortable in an online, active voice. It took me a long time to find it. I still take the opportunity to do lots of lurking---on library-related blogs and on blogs I read for entertainment. Lurking affords us the opportunity to learn from (and in an ancillary way, participate in) social and professional situations without all of the messy drama of direct interactions. Some might say that lurking is what drives the growing popularity of the Social Web.

And one P.S: In the spirit of lurking, I'll be disappointed if you comment on this post! :)