Photo Credit: Lisa Viscovich
Author. Professor. Founder.
Gina Sipley, Ph.D. is the author of the book, Just Here For The Comments: Lurking As Digital Literacy Practice. Her research and essays on technology, education, and culture have been published in New Media + Society, Al Jazeera America, Newsday, London School of Economics Impact Blog, Mic, Slate, EdSurge and have been presented at international conferences such as AoIR, SXSW EDU, and MLA. As a poet, her work has appeared in New York Quarterly, The Paterson Literary Review and The Healing Muse, among others. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing and affiliate faculty in the Women’s and Gender Studies Project at SUNY Nassau Community College where she serves as the English Program Coordinator and Vice Chair of the Creative Writing Program.
Dr. Sipley is the Founder of Aurora Collaborative, an educational services organization for lifelong learning and professional development.
A first generation college graduate, she is an alumna of SUNY Binghamton (BA), Syracuse University (MA), University of Oregon (M.Ed), and Hofstra University (Ph.D) and holds NYS Teaching Licenses for Grades 5-12 in English and Social Studies and Oregon State Licenses for Grades 5-9 in Math and Science.
Just Here For the Comments: Lurking As Digital Literacy Practice
We all sometimes 'lurk' in online spaces without posting or engaging, just reading the posts and comments. But 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, this book 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. Unique and original in its subject, this is a call for internet researchers to broaden their methods to include lurkers' participation and presence.
Available for Purchase
Thomas Poell, University of Amsterdam
“Lively and relatable, sprinkled with discussions of popular lurker memes, but also thoroughly researched and theorized, this book provides a deeply insightful, much-needed analysis of lurking.”
Brooke Erin Duffy, Cornell University