After four years of practice, I found that I was lurking: In addition to sharing snaps with friends on a private Instagram page, I was consuming strangers’ social media content without posting or commenting. You’d think a person who trusted and enjoyed these conversations would contribute to them, report that she also made chocolate lava cake in tins, or that hyperbaric chambers can work wonders after surgery. But not. Although I enjoy connecting with others over the Internet, I am still a confirmed lurker. I’ll hit a heart icon and contribute to a like count, but I find the public nature of social media engagement too performative for me. In the online world, where anyone can get on stage, I’m happy to sit in the audience and clap.
I started stalking the year before Covid. I worked two office jobs (one as an editor at a design firm, one as editor-in-chief at a magazine), writing freelance stories and going back and forth between my San Francisco apartment and my then-boyfriend’s apartment. home in Oakland. I was always moving between different meetings and modes of transit, never having enough time for anything, not even exercising or preparing meals. Consequently, I felt as if the walls of my pants were closing in. So, I opened the WeightWatchers app.
Alongside the tools used to track diet and exercise, there was something I didn’t expect: a sort of in-app Instagram, open to members only. By this time, the shine of social media had faded for me. She was past the feelings of comparison, the troublesome echo chambers. But Connect, as the platform was called, it was something else.
Unlike my other sources, it was not a group of people I knew because they were from my geographic region, field of work, or socioeconomic class. They were people united by a common problem. 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 supposed to talk about weight loss. It was a community full of random people you’d probably never meet in real life, telling stories about trying to do your best, and cheerleaders in the comments who were right there with them.
Connect turned out to be a gateway drug. I would find myself digging into the comments on New York Humans, an Instagram account that narrates the life of the city’s inhabitants, and publish secret, which encourages people to send anonymous postcards detailing the intimacies of their lives. I followed long comment threads at the bottom of recipes online and absorbed the inside jokes on zillow Gone Wild, that shares the craziest houses on the real estate platform. Not to mention the long trips back and forth on “Am I the asshole?” posts on Reddit.
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