[Air-L] Participation inequality - querying the crowd

Derek Hansen shakmatt at gmail.com
Thu Oct 30 09:59:09 PDT 2008


You may also want to look at some of the literature on Lurkers (e.g.,
by Preece and colleagues, as well as others more recently). While it
doesn't address all of the issues you raise, it will give a few
pointers. There is also an article by Butler, et al. ("Community Work,
Who Does the Work and Why?") that looks at motivations of highly
active members (e.g., admins):
http://kb.cospa-project.org/retrieve/3248/butler.pdf

Two additional thoughts on what factors may be important to consider:
1) How closely the topic of the discussion aligns with a person's own
interests or needs
2) Factors related to the specific nature of the communities - e.g.,
in health communities (which I have studied) the stage of disease
(e.g., newly diagnosed) seems to impact participation; most
dramatically, people may stop participating once they are cured of an
illness (although interestingly some of the most active members
don't). I haven't addressed the question itself, but that is my
impression based on interviews etc.

Derek Hansen
Assistant Professor
Maryland's iSchool

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 9:01 AM, Sarita Yardi <sarita.yardi at gmail.com> wrote:
> Neat question Bernie,
>
> I'd be interested in a summary of what you find. It seems like the
> 1990s rhetoric of the digital divide and access is dying (in the U.S.,
> not worldwide). I'm more concerned about types of participation being
> unequal. One paper I like that may be of interest is Eszter
> Hargittai's "Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of
> Social Network Sites".
>
> It looks at how differences in race, gender, and ethnicity influence
> participation. It's not about motivation--which your question
> asks--but the Discussion section does look to explore some of the
> findings towards this end.
>
> http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/hargittai.html
>
>
> --
> Human-Centered Computing
> College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
> www.cc.gatech.edu/~yardi
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