It’s not a problem that more people don’t participate

22 October 2006 | Community, Internet, Media | Comments

Two things crossed my clickstream today.

First, in Henry Jenkins’ fantastic book “Convergence Culture” he mentions a “participation gap” that exists between the largely well-off and technically sophisticated early adopters of internet technologies and the general populace. The better off you are, the more able you are to participate and this poses a problem for Jenkins. I largely agree.

However, the second thing was in usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s more recent column: he talks about research arguing that, “In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.” Nielsen has some good things to say about drawing conclusions about mass audience behavior from the behavior of an extreme few who contribute regularly.

Generally, I’m not at all sure about the numbers — I’m looking into it — but more importantly I’m interested in Nielsen’s use of the word “lurkers.”

Lurker, with its mental-rhyme and the consonants it shares with “stalker” has a pejorative thrust that rings false. When someone lurks, he’s standing in a dark alleyway waiting to clobber you over the head with a big stick.

But the passive participants rather than active contributors who make up, per Nielsen, the vast majority of an online community’s users aren’t carrying sticks… they’re carrying validity.

The millions of people who use Wikipedia without contributing to it aren’t leeches sucking life from the information leviathan. On the contrary, those clicks constitute the significant participation that enables Wikipedia to be considered an important and serious resource. Unless you’re Emily Dickinson — and mostly not even then — nobody will ever care about the things you create that nobody else sees or reads.

The one good thing about “lurker” is that it DOES convey how quickly the passive user can become active and leap into activity, but while it’s important to acknowledge that potential, it’s still important not to diss the quiet users.

Would any media property, no matter how small, really want chronic contribution and commentary from ALL of its users? I can’t imagine so… it would merely add petabytes of junk information to an already overwhelming amount of data that it’s hard to wade through, day in and day out.

And to all you Babylon 5 fans out there, yes, I get the maybe-reference. (The rest of you can look it up.)