Thanks Barry. That's the point I was making in a previous post -- listservs, blogs, and so on are not communities but sets of diverse participants with thin relations -- important and vibrant relations, but not somewhere where one can meaningfully be said to "lurk." -- Bonnie On May 10, 2007, at 4:08 PM, Barry Wellman wrote:
As one of the age-oldest (64) and email-oldest (since 1976) members of this list, I'd like to hazard a remembrance of where the term "lurking" comes. (Speaking of which, where is Blair Nonnecke, because that's what his diss was on?)
In times past, the vision was a small, tightly-knit virtual community all communing with each other. (Think of the WELL). In that vision, non-communicators were not playing by the rules of the game of the active community. They were "lurking" while others were active community builders.
Now, it's pretty clear that most people move among a bunch of partial communities, participating to various extent in some but not others. They are readers in some/many, and more or less contributors to others. This is true online as well as offline. So "lurking" only makes sense in things like a small workgroup or family circle, where all are expected to communicate. It makes no sense for this large list, or for others.
PS: Thanks to James Whyte for his count of who participates. One slight methodological flaw. If there are 1800 on this list now, there probably are > 2000 who have been on at some point in the past 12 months in which he counted participation. So the denominator is off. Hence the proportion of contributors is probably low by 10 to 20%. But still, this is an impressively active list.
Barry Wellman _____________________________________________________________________
Barry Wellman S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology NetLab Director Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman For fun -- updating songs, movies and history: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php Elvis wouldn't be singing Return to Sender now _____________________________________________________________________
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Bonnie A. Nardi Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697-3440 (949) 824-6534 www.artifex.org/~bonnie/