We are all lurkers: consuming behaviors among authors and readers in an enterprise file-sharing service

Most knowledge repositories focus on the role of knowledge-creators. In this paper, by contrast, we examined the work of Lurkers in an enterprise file-sharing service, and we compared their lurking behaviors to the lurking behaviors of users who uploaded files (Uploaders), and users who contributed metadata about files (Contributors). For comparability, we restricted our analyses to the consuming behaviors that are common to the three roles (Uploaders, Contributors, and Lurkers). Independent principal components analysis showed highly similar seven-factor solutions of lurking activities across all three roles, although the relative emphases of those factors varied across roles. Uploaders tended to view and download more groups of files, showed less emphasis on searching for files, and tended to work directly with the file-sharing application, unmediated by external applications. Contributors showed the opposite pattern: more emphasis on searching and responding to recommendations from other users, often via a form of remote access. Lurkers' lurking behaviors were less intense, and showed little difference in emphases among the lurker factors. We use these results, and the published research literature, to motivate a research agenda for lurkers in social media.

[1]  Michael J. Muller,et al.  Patterns of usage in an enterprise file-sharing service: publicizing, discovering, and telling the news , 2010, CHI.

[2]  Mark W. Newman,et al.  Share and share alike: exploring the user interface affordances of file sharing , 2006, CHI.

[3]  Loren G. Terveen,et al.  Lurking? cyclopaths?: a quantitative lifecycle analysis of user behavior in a geowiki , 2010, CHI.

[4]  Gilad Ravid,et al.  De-lurking in virtual communities: a social communication network approach to measuring the effects of social and cultural capital , 2004, 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2004. Proceedings of the.

[5]  Jennifer Preece,et al.  The top five reasons for lurking: improving community experiences for everyone , 2004, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[6]  Emilee J. Rader,et al.  Yours, mine and (not) ours: social influences on group information repositories , 2009, CHI.

[7]  Jonathan Bishop,et al.  Increasing participation in online communities: A framework for human-computer interaction , 2007, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[8]  Lars Mathiassen,et al.  Ethnocritical Heuristics for Reflecting on Work with Users and Other Interested Parties , 2003 .

[9]  L. Alcoff.  The problem of speaking for others , 1991 .

[10]  B. Shneiderman,et al.  The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivating Technology-Mediated Social Participation , 2009 .

[11]  Masakazu Fujimoto,et al.  The active lurker: influence of an in-house online community on its outside environment , 2003, GROUP.

[12]  James Kohnen,et al.  Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies , 2011 .

[13]  Cristian Bogdan,et al.  Tuning In: Challenging Design for Communities through a Field Study of Radio Amateurs , 2007 .

[14]  Nicolas Curien,et al.  Internet and Digital Economics: Online consumer communities: escaping the tragedy of the digital commons , 2007 .

[15]  Elaine Toms,et al.  Information displays for managing shared files , 2008, CHiMiT '08.

[16]  Jennifer Preece,et al.  Lurker demographics: counting the silent , 2000, CHI.

[17]  S. O'Donohoe,et al.  Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies , 2008 .

[18]  Joe Grobelny,et al.  Designing for the Social Web , 2009 .

[19]  Michael J. Muller,et al.  Motivations for social networking at work , 2008, CSCW.

[20]  P. Kollock,et al.  Managing the virtual commons : Cooperation and conflict in computer communities , 1996 .

[21]  Emilee J. Rader.  The effect of audience design on labeling, organizing, and finding shared files , 2010, CHI.

[22]  Michael J. Muller,et al.  Information Curators in an Enterprise File-Sharing Service , 2009, ECSCW.

[23]  Coye Cheshire,et al.  Readers are not free-riders: reading as a form of participation on wikipedia , 2010, CSCW '10.

[24]  Michael J. Muller.  Ethnocritical heuristics for reflecting on work with users and other interested parties , 1997 .

[25]  Nicolas Curien,et al.  Internet and Digital Economics , 2008 .

[26]  Pamela Effrein Sandstrom,et al.  Information Foraging Theory: Adaptive Interaction with Information , 2010, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[27]  Sheizaf Rafaeli,et al.  Invisible participants: how cultural capital relates to lurking behavior , 2006, WWW '06.

[28]  Jintae Lee,et al.  An end-user perspective on file-sharing systems , 2003, CACM.

[29]  Etienne Wenger,et al.  Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation , 1991 .

[30]  Jennifer Preece,et al.  Non-public and public online community participation: Needs, attitudes and behavior , 2006, Electron. Commer. Res..

[31]  Richard A. Lanham,et al.  The `Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information , 2006 .

[32]  John Riedl,et al.  Creating, destroying, and restoring value in wikipedia , 2007, GROUP.

[33]  Andreas Nürnberger,et al.  A Trilogy of Webs for Machines , 2010, LDSI@FIA.

[34]  Ed H. Chi,et al.  Information Seeking Can Be Social , 2009, Computer.