It is another word for Nixon's "Silent Majority". IMHO, If you placed announcements for conference and call for papers out of the main listserv there might be some bandwidth for serious discusions.Please don't interpret my statement as derisive of such posting. I have often thought how valuable such postings are. But they do fill the mailbox. Barry is correct in saying that if everyone was a contributor, the result would be chaos. James Kevin Guidry <krguidry@gmail.com> wrote: On 5/7/07, Nancy Baym 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.

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. Kevin _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ --------------------------------- Don't pick lemons. See all the new 2007 cars at Yahoo! Autos.

On 5/7/07, Nancy Baym <nbaym@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