She is "a leading researcher in self-representation in social media"[3] and a European Research Council grantee (2018–2023) with the project Machine Vision in Everyday Life: Playful Interactions with Visual Technologies in Digital Art, Games, Narratives and Social Media[4][5].

[7][8] After completing an MA in Comparative Literature at the University of Bergen in 1998,[9] Rettberg worked for a year on a research project developing educational MOOs,[10] and in 2003 completed a doctoral degree in Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen under the supervision of Espen Aarseth.

[12] In addition to her academic positions, Jill Walker Rettberg is a member of the Research Council of Norway's portfolio board for Humanities and Social Sciences (2019–2023),[13] and was previously a member of Arts Council Norway's research and development committee.

The book was praised for its "intelligent theoretical and critical attitude",[25] its accessible style[26][27] and "its recognition that blogging is ultimately about humans, not metrics".

[28] With the book Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves Rettberg examined three key modes of self-representation in social media: textual, as in blogs, visual, as in selfies, and quantitative, as in self-tracking and the growing quantitative self movement.