[Air-L] Research on "passive" social media use?

[elif yilmaz]

Hi again,

These are some other essential studies that you may want to look at.


Jones, Q., & Rafaeli, S. (1999). User population and user contributions to
virtual publics: A systems model. Proceedings of the International ACM
SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work, 239 320325. Phoenix, Arizona,
United States, doi: 10.1145/320297.320325

Lampe, C. (2006). Ratings use in an online discussion system: The Slashdot
case. Ph. D. Thesis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.

Lee, Y. W., Chen, F. C., & Jiang, H. M. (2006). Lurking as participation: a
community perspective on lurkers' identity and negotiability404-410,

Mockus, A., Fielding, R. T., & Herbsleb, J. D. (2002). Two case studies of
open source software development: Apache and Mozilla. ACM Transactions on
Software Engineering Methodology, 11(3), 309-346. doi: 10.1145/567793.567795

Zhang, W., & Storck, J. (2001). Peripheral members in online communities.
Paper presented at the 7th Americas Conference on Information Systems,
Boston, MA. http://hdl.handle.net/2038/1108

Elif Yilmaz
PhD Candidate, Media and Information Studies
Michigan State University


On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 12:57 PM, Dominic Yeo <skyrock at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Lisbeth,
>
> You might want to look up the literature on power law of participation:
>
>
> Adamic, L. A., & Huberman, B. A. (2002). Zipf’s law and the Internet.
> Glottometrics, 3(1), 143—50.
>
> Adar, E., & Huberman, B. A. (2000, October 2). Free riding on
> Gnutella. Retrieved October 30, 2008, from
> http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_10/adar/
>
> Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production
> Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press.
>
> Mayfield, R. (2006, April 27). Power Law of Participation. Ross
> Mayfield's Weblog. Retrieved October 29, 2008, from
> http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2006/04/power_law_of_pa.html
>
> Joyce, E., & Kraut, R. E. (2006). Predicting Continued Participation
> in Newsgroups. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(3),
> 723-747.
>
> Lakhani, K. R., & von Hippel, E. (2003). How open source software
> works: "free" user-to-user assistance. Research Policy, 32(6),
> 923-943.
>
>
> Regards,
> Dominic
>
> ----------------------
> Message: 13
> Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 15:44:21 +0100
> From: "Lisbeth Klastrup" <klastrup at itu.dk>
> To: <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
> Cc: klastrup at itu.dk
> Subject: [Air-L] Research on "passive" social media use?
> Message-ID: <004001ca5d5d$4d2543f0$e76fcbd0$@dk>
> Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Hi all,
> A question related to what we do NOT do while spending our time on social
> network sites:
>
> I?m currently trying to dig up academic literature documenting in some form
> the numbers of active versus passive users of social media, with special
> focus on the passive users.? ?Active? here for the sake of argument meant
> in
> a broad sense:? uploading content, commenting, rating; and ?passive? as
> just
> watching or reading, but not interacting with content in any way.? Im
> basically interested in all forms of recent academic research on this,
> which
> actually provide some numbers, not just mentionings of ?rule of thumbs? or
> second-hand information.
> ?
> Particularly, I?d love to know if anyone has researched how many people?
> ?just? read status updates and do NOT comment, retweet, ?Like? them etc on
> sites like Facebook or Twitter. (I know it?s a tricky question and perhaps
> not very useful to make the distinction, since most are likely to have
> commented or ?liked? at some point, but then again I surmise some people
> are
> more likely to do it on a more regularly basis than others, and some are
> very rarely active??)
>
> What I have found so far:
> A 2008 OfCom report in their UK survey results reports that ?40% looks at
> other people?s sites (eg. SNS profiles) without leaving messages?, but does
> not deal with ?passivity? otherwise. A Sysomos survey of Twitter users
> claims to have found that 21% of people with Twitter-accounts have never
> tweeted (so they must be ?passive? readers of other people?s tweets?).
>
> I know of? Jenny Preece?s early work on lurkers, and Jose Van Dijck in her
> 2009 paper ?Users like you? Theorizing agency in user-generated content?
> mentions a Forrester report from 2007 ?Mapping Participation in Activities?
> (which you have to pay for), talking of 33% of users being passive
> spectators (of videos, blogs etc) and 52% ?inactives?. An OECD 2007 report
> ?Participative Web: User-Generated content? (according to Dijck) says more
> than 80% are passive recipients of content. All in all not much knowledge
> to
> go by, and mostly just numbers. And then there?s the 1/10/89 % meme, but
> how
> substantial is it:
> www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/jul/20/guardianweeklytechnologysection2
>
> I've perused Danah Boyd?s extensive list on social network research, but at
> least judging from the titles of articles listed there & still unknown to
> me, ?passive? SNS use hasn?t really been the topic of any papers so far?
>
> So:
> Do any of you know of any (other) work in this area? ? I?ll be happy to do
> a
> summary here or in the social media sphere..
>
> Lisbeth Klastrup,
> IT University of Copenhagen
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