[Air-l] we need a better word than lurking

[Nancy Baym]

>On 5/7/07, Nancy Baym <nbaym at ku.edu> wrote:
>>  Funny you mention that. Just a few minutes ago I was working on a
>>  paper and when I got to the point where I wanted to talk about
>>  "lurkers" I stopped and chose "invisible participants" instead.

to which Kevin Guidry wrote:

>    I'd like to hear more about this decision.  I find it difficult to
>describe those who do not, well, participate as participants.  I
>assume your definition of participation is different from mine.

My word choice was influenced by the likes of Goffman, with his 
concept of participation frameworks of interactions, and Bakhtin, 
with his conceptions of the anticipated/assumed audience, rather than 
celebratory notions of Web2 every-one-is-a-creator rhetoric. Both 
theorists note that speakers are situated in contexts that include 
varied kinds of listeners who are addressed, excluded, and tolerated 
to varying degrees and who have varying degrees of visibility. 
Goffman, for instance, talks of bystanders and eavesdroppers in 
addition to addressees. If I am at a large party, and talking to two 
people standing right in front of me, with whom I am making 
intermittent eye contact and toward whom I am orienting my body, they 
are my obvious addressees, but chances are that I am choosing what I 
say with an awareness that there are others in the environment who 
may hear this.

The bystanders are visible at the party, but not on the internet, but 
that doesn't mean their influence disappears. Furthermore, in the 
context of the internet, posters are often not only aware of an 
audience that may never post, they often formulate their messages 
assuming the readership of people who will remain silent. In many 
cases they would not contribute except for that assumption, and in 
most all cases, they formulate their messages with a sense (whether 
accurate or not) of who those people are in mind. For example, when 
people post queries to this list, it is not just to receive responses 
from the limited number of subscribers who post, it is also to 
receive responses from readers who may never have posted before but 
who are assumed to be there with expertise not yet known. Indeed, 
such people often emerge in responses to such queries. If bloggers 
blogged only for the people who comment on their posts, most would 
give up in despair. Instead they either assume a readership or they 
deduce its presence from the traces left from feedreader subscriber 
counts, hit rates, and so on. Such people may also make themselves 
known in "backstage" venues (to borrow another notion from Goffman), 
sending emails behind the scenes.

Silent readers are also increasingly important in the online economy 
as their presence may generate ad revenue for the sites they visit 
thereby fiscally supporting their continued existence. In the 
contexts of online fan communities (about which I was writing today), 
their reading of groups may be connected to purchasing the product 
being discussed and they may therefore be playing essential roles in 
keeping the object of fandom commercially viable or at least afloat.

My point is that online interaction does not occur in spite of the 
"lurkers," it often happens because of and in anticipation of their 
assumed presence (in addition of course to the presence of those 
who've made themselves visible). Their presence is integral to the 
creation of the communication. If they really were not there, much 
online communication in public forums would either cease or be cut 
back dramatically. That is why I consider their action of visiting 
sites to be a form of participation, even when they do not make it 
visible through explicit contributions.

I used the word lurker for years, and I still use it, but I think it 
fails to capture the fact that their/our presence shapes the 
formation of online messages.

Nancy

-- 
Nancy Baym	http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym
Communication Studies, University of Kansas
Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Room 102, Lawrence, KS 66045-7574, USA
Blog: http://www.onlinefandom.com