• Corpus ID: 110055718

Shedding Light on Lurkers in Online Communities

@inproceedings{Nonnecke1999SheddingLO,
  title={Shedding Light on Lurkers in Online Communities},
  author={Blair Nonnecke and Jennifer Preece},
  year={1999}
}
Lurkers are reported to make up a sizable proportion of many online communities, yet little is known about their reasons for lurking, who they are, and how they lurk. In this study, interviews with online community members provided a formative understanding of these and other issues. We discovered that lurking is a systematic and idiosyncratic process, with well-developed rationales and strategies. All interviewees lurked, but not all the time, and several developed a sense of community through… 
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127 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
9
Background Citations
64
Methods Citations
3
Results Citations
4

127 Citations

What lurkers and posters think of each other [online community]

The results of the analysis indicate that posters and lurkers go online for similar reasons, but lurkers were less enthusiastic about the benefits of community membership and perceived a greater than expected benefit.

Online Lurkers Tell Why

Based on the finding that only 13.2% of lurkers indicated they were “going to lurk from the outset”, lurking can be a product of the community interaction itself, and specific suggestions for managing lurking and developing better community tools are proposed.

On lurking: Multiple perspectives on lurking within an educational community

Non-public and public online community participation: Needs, attitudes and behavior

It is concluded that when people lurk they are observing, which in no way is a negative behavior and introverted or passive behavior affects lurkers' attitudes about the benefits of the community, their expectations, and opinions of themselves and others who lurk.

Posting, Lurking, and Networking: Behaviors and Characteristics of Consumers in the Context of User-Generated Content

While user-generated content (UGC) and social media have generated interest from researchers and practitioners, many facets of users and producers of such content remain undocumented. This research…

Beyond Lurking: The Invisible Follower-Feeder In An Online Community Ecosystem

It is argued that the online community is best seen as part of a larger, polycontextual community ecosystem, comprising diverse online and offline contexts – community engagement spaces – and that the nature of value of roles in this ecosystem is best understood by focusing on understanding cross-boundary social activity and knowledge transfer, rather than by investigating online interactions only.

Rethinking Lurking: Invisible Leading and Following in a Knowledge Transfer Ecosystem

© 2015, Association for Information Systems. All rights reserved. The term lurker connotes a low-value role in online communities. Despite making up the majority of members, these invisible…

Lurker demographics: counting the silent

This paper presents a demographic study of lurking in email-based discussion lists (DLs) with an emphasis on health and software-support DLs, finding that health-supportDLs have on average significantly fewer lurkers than software- support DLs.

TheQuirks of Being a Wallflower: Towards Defining Lurkers and Loners in Games Through A Systematic Literature Review

Research support that online multiplayer games build social capital and contribute to people’s well-being. Players build meaningful, strong relationships through games, resulting in complex…

Three Lenses on Lurking: Making Sense of Digital Silence

In this chapter, the authors provide a critical exploration of the concept of lurking in online learning spaces through a phenomenological inquiry. The authors begin from a position that lurking is…
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References

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