[mostly_a_lurker]

> neither reading nor lurking are ever passive acts. In fact, readers of social media are making decisions and taking grassroots actions on multiple dimensions. Unpacking this understudied phenomenon, Just Here for the Comments: Lurking as Digital Literacy Practice (Bristol UP, 2024) by Gina Sipley challenges the conventional perspective of what counts as participatory online culture. Presenting lurking as a communication and literacy practice that resists dominant power structures, it offers an innovative approach to digital qualitative methods [...]

Something is a bit strange about this presentation. "Grassroots" is not the opposite of "passive", and likewise "participatory" is not the same thing as resisting dominant power structures. If anything, since lurking is something most people do most of the time, that would suggest it is first and foremost a conventional rather than radical activity (I mean this both literally and in terms of the implied political positioning of the typical internet lurker).

In any case, something can be understudied and worth studying, interesting or uninteresting, and worthy of celebration or not, whether or not it resists dominant power structures. If it turned out most people lurked because they were usually using the internet for information rather than action, and that it had nothing to do with resisting power structures, that would still be worth studying simply because it would be a major aspect of how people use the internet.

[rendaw]

"Taking ... actions" is the opposite of "passive". "participatory" seems to be about not being passive and is not connected to the next sentence.

Re: resisting dominant power structures, I think you'd have to read "Just here for the Comments" to know why she suggests it's a political move. The text here describes it without presenting the actual arguments I think.

Or at least, that's what I got from it.

[digging]

Yeah, to be honest this is a baffling description. I'm probably similar to a kind of person they're talking about and I genuinely do not understand what they're trying to say about my lurking practices.

[sctb]

This is about as bog standard as it gets for academic language in the humanities. For example:

> But neither reading nor lurking are ever passive acts.

These acts are indeed passive, relative to the active counterpart of writing or speaking. A basic academic move is to reframe a concept in a more abstract, generalized, and artificial context, within which you can argue pretty much anything. The more insane and counterintuitive the argument sounds, the more stylish and impactful it's perceived to be. "Understudied" means that no-one has yet marketed this particular flavour combination of intellectual schlock.

They're not actually talking about your lurking practices.

[veyh]

They probably want you to buy the book to find out.