[Air-l] Lurking

[Frank Schaap]

Mike wrote:
> The "Free Rider" concept suggests to me that the value of e-lists are in
> their content.  Rather, I would suggest, the real value of an e-list comes
> from participation, thus those who are only "monitoring/lurking" are not
> getting as much value from the list (feedback, recognition, networking and
> so on), as those who are actively participating.

I agree... but, you're also dealing with other issues of group-dynamics here,
and some of them are more 'technical' than social... I mean, with this list of
say, 600 subscribers, not all could post on a regular basis because that would
mean too much traffic for the subscribers, exponential curves and such.

The traffic on this list is rather high as it is and I don't know how others
deal with it, but I have 1) too many unread messages in my Air-L folder and 2)
unfortunately delete quite a lot of messages after having scanned the subject
and first couple of lines of the message.

I thank the many lurkers on this list for keeping the traffic in almost
manageable bounds.

Frank.
-who will try not posting too often.

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