Reviewing the Definitions of “Lurkers” and Some Implications for Online Research

Abstract

Little research focuses on lurking in the online environment or considers lurking as a valid and important form of online behavior. This may be due to the fact that there are a number of definitions, and most of them focus on a lack of participation or contribution or see it as a problematic behavior that needs to be changed. Such definitions have given lurkers a negative connotation. They need to be considered as an important factor in online research, starting with a clearer and more positive definition of lurking. It is also necessary to understanding why users decide to lurk, what activities lurkers engage in, and whether the online environment is more valuable by turning lurkers into posters.

Introduction

In 2006, TIME Magazine nominated “You” as the person of the year,¹ where “you” are all the users of the Internet driving Internet development by producing user-generated content and through a variety of participatory activities such as chatting, sharing, e-mailing, blogging, socializing, and creating. While public online participation may represent one form of online behavior, there are other forms that are often neither considered nor fully understood in online sciences and research. One such behavior is lurking. Lurkers often represent the largest portion of the online environment. Yet the term has many meanings, often negative ones. This paper has several main aims. First, it provides a review of some of the definitions used in research literature. Second, lurking is not always a passive behavior, but active participants who are very much in a position to support others (people, communities) in the online environment. Third, while Shirky² emphasizes that any activity and any form of participation should be encouraged, research should not always be about finding ways to encourage a lurker to engage visibly, but first of all about recognizing and understanding lurking.

Definitions of Lurking

Lurking is a popular activity among online users, made possible by technology that provides users access without having to be visible or publicly participate³ and leaves no traces.⁴ Yet “it is not even clear what lurking means.”⁵ This is one of the many challenges in studying lurking, as there are many definitions, and researchers often develop their own new definition.

Lurking is usually associated with nonparticipation, and definitions of lurking are often related to nonposting behavior, although these definitions vary in numerical terms. Lurkers are those who post infrequently,⁶ who do not make a contribution in the first 12 months after subscribing to a list,⁵ who have not posted in recent months,⁷ or who never or only occasionally post a message.^3,7–9 The term “lurker” is often used to describe someone who observes what is going on but doesn't participate or remains silent, and is thus associated with observation, silence, inactivity/passivity, invisibility, or bystander behavior. They are described as a passive or invisible, hard to reach or hard to involve population in online communities, nonpublic participants,⁸ inactive and silent,¹⁰ even though they can make up more than 90% of the online group.¹¹ Lurkers are seen as those members who log into a community, read blogs and discussions, but don't contribute.^11,12

Lurking has negative connotations—someone who does not participate “but he's out there…watching, reading every message…If a fight breaks out he will quietly observe to avoid revealing his position.”¹³ The most famous and most influential definition of lurking sees them as free-riders who take without reciprocating.¹⁴ Lurkers are those people who hang around, want something for nothing, and are not committed to the community.¹⁵ Lurking erodes the online community¹⁶ and threatens the online groups and its activities: “the existence of ‘lurkers’ may lead to [the] group fading, as some active participants may be disheartened to continue with the discussion when they fail to get any feedback, verbal or non-verbal, from others.”¹⁷ Lurkers are seen as unnecessary for communication, an obstruction, as “the scourge that prevents successful collective efforts,”¹⁸ exhausting bandwidth. Since the goal of most online communities is discussion and interaction, may there be some justification for a negative view of lurkers? Success of social media and online tools depends on active participation and contributions, enticing current members back and new ones to join.¹⁹ Lurkers are seen as participants that hide and assume false identities,¹⁶ receiving the benefits of belonging to the group without giving anything back. So online communities try to organize themselves to prevent lurking or encourage active posting.

Defining Lurking: Implications for Research

Research needs other definitions of lurking, definitions that see it as a form of normal online behavior. Defining lurkers in positive terms can show that they are valid participants, capable of supporting online communities and contributing to innovation, and that lurking, like other online behaviors, involves a complex set of behaviors, rationales, and activities.²⁰ A redefinition of lurking can also help to show that lurking is not only normal or positive, but also an active, participative, and valuable form of online behavior. Redefining lurking so that it can be useful for research will have to begin by considering why people lurk.

Why lurk? Reasons for lurking

One reason for lurking is that is easy.¹⁶ But online research needs to consider other reasons users choose or prefer to lurk. It might well be that some lurkers are free-riders, but many lurk for other reasons, including pro-social and altruistic reasons.

Nonnecke and Preece³ urge that lurking be seen as a behavior reflecting the users' needs and reasons, and these can be personal (entertainment, curiosity, and learning), to satisfy information needs, to learn about the group, to maintain privacy and safety, to reduce noise and exposure on the site, to act within constraints, and to act in response to group dynamics.

In any medium, certain people learn to dominate, and groups tend to move in directions driven by dominant personalities.²¹ Some participants are more impulsive, others more cautious. Some don't feel the need to make themselves heard when others represent their opinions. Some feel they get what they need without intruding and some feel shy. At the same time, lurking may depend on the context rather than it being an individual trait.⁵

Focusing on users' individual motivations may also help understand why users lurk. Preece et al.²² suggest that participants and lurkers may choose to go online for similar reasons, but lurkers do not expect to receive or give answers in the same way as posters. Preece et al. also found that few lurkers actually intend to lurk from the onset, and that lurking may also be a reaction to the online community or the style of interaction found there. As online participation requires processing capacities—and people only have finite resources for such processing —Haythornthwaite²³ suggests that lurking may be a reaction to information overload, that is, lurkers are reacting to or trying to avoid contributing to the chaos often found in online communities. But online participation and collaboration can often be impeded by group processes,²⁴ including coercion by the majority, reluctance of minority members to speak out because of the fear of other participants' reactions,²⁵ communication apprehension, opinion dissonance, or even social loafing.²⁶

Lurkers as valuable participants

Traditional approaches have the effect that the lurking community members are dismissed as not being as valuable as contributing community members. While public posting represents one way of communicating and one way the community may benefit, lurking can be a positive and helpful behavior, a way of giving, receiving, providing/obtaining support, or learning. Lurking is the most popular online behavior, and given that lurkers may actually spend many hours lurking, they are well informed, familiar, and emphasize with others, even if they never visibly post or reply directly. As a behavior common to the majority of online users in information or collaborative environments,¹⁸ it is necessary to understand and define lurking behaviors in terms of how it can be beneficial and valuable. Furthermore, in future, they may be visible users and provide key revenue sources and vital information, so they do not need to be dismissed.^6,15

Some online groups encourage lurking because it helps new users get a feeling for the group, the kind of people who participate in it, and how it operates.²⁷ At the same time, lurkers may learn vicariously by reading the experiences other participants report.²⁸

Lurking as active behavior

A clear premise is necessary: lurkers are not nonusers. Lurkers do use the technology and visit sites. Nonusers, on the other hand, are those who do not use any information and communication technologies for a number of reasons, such as a lack of financial resources or lack of skills, poor education, emotional reasons, or simply because they resent using it.^29,30

One reason why the majority of lurkers choose not to post is because they are reading and browsing, and that may be enough for them.⁸ All users need to read before they can engage in any other activity.³¹ So lurkers are active as they reading rather than ignoring the material,³² and by reading they are not taking advantage of others' efforts.^18,33 Muller³³ describes lurkers as “social readers,” where reading is not a solitary, unconnected, unproductive action but a social activity that occurs in a social context, involves other people, and contributes to the social worlds of readers, authors, and organizations. He makes everybody a lurker, as all users read before engaging in another activity.

Lurking can also be defined as listening.³⁴ In many contexts, lurkers serve as conventional mass media audience. Yet at the same time, lurkers obviously derive value from their activities, otherwise they would not engage in them.¹² Crawford³⁵ uses lurking to analyze the different ways of participating online, and proposes lurking-as-listening as a metaphor for paying attention online.

As active rather than passive participants, lurkers are goal driven, engage in different activities, and employ a range of strategies. Active posting is not the only way to be part of a community, and lurking is more than not posting or just reading others' posts, but can include activities such as editing and organizing messages. Lurkers use different strategies and the strategies chosen help the lurkers to decide whether to read or not, which threads to follow, deal with the messages, keep the information manageable, and finally to maximize return on effort.

Lurkers may have never posted a message, but “they can cruise from site to site in peaceful anonymity, picking up perspective, information and insight,”³⁶ and this will have effects outside the boundaries of the online communities. Takahshi et al.^37,38 and Willet³⁹ develop the notions of active lurkers and passive lurkers, where active lurkers are those who make direct contact with posters in an interactive environment or propagate information or knowledge gained from it, while passive lurkers read for their own use only. Lurkers' behaviors may have effects outside the online communities, and their activities should not be neglected.⁴⁰ They not only enlarge the size of the group as an audience, but they also increase its influence, as the information gained may be used in other online groups or offline settings, lead to connections with other networks, as well as bring new contacts and members. Lurkers may use information or knowledge for their own activities, but they act as the weak/strong ties of a community⁴¹ and connect “otherwise isolated social spaces”⁵ by passing information, knowledge, and content to other online and offline environments. Lurkers' behaviors can also be used as a metric of online social influence: the “return on contribution” (ROC) is based on the number of people who read, view, or consume a resource divided by the number of people who produced the resource.^31,32 Lurkers may be the hidden asset in online communities.^42,43

Further Considerations

While there is an increasing expectation that everybody should be using online tools, people will always have different ways of engaging online, deciding how and with whom to engage, and when to switch off and be unavailable, unhearing, and unheard.³⁵ Online research has focused on those who have spoken up and contribute visibly, but there has been little research into other forms of participation. Katz³⁸ makes the plea that although lurkers are not heard or seen, they need more attention, as they are, after all, the largest group of the users. On the premise “that everyone is likely to lurk at least some of the time and frequently most of the time,”³ research needs to pay greater attention to the role of lurkers and lurking, recognize that lurkers are active, reading, listening, being receptive, connecting, forwarding. In spite of the lingering negative definitions, recognizing and understanding lurking as normal behavior or form of communication is important for online research, as it has wide-reaching consequences, not all of them known yet.

Lurking as an aspect of participation

Online technology has focused on users “having a voice,” and research has focused on the extent that the technologies are used so that individuals can express themselves freely in cyberspace.³⁷ This focus has been criticized, as online participation is often seen as a dichotomy between those who participate and those who don't (and those who don't are assumed to free-ride), and this is view is too simplistic.¹⁸ Lurking plays a role in many aspects of online life. In e-business, every lurker is a potential customer. In e-government, knowing more about lurkers may lead to tools, initiatives, and policies that are able to support citizens in different contexts, and more generally to the development of improved tools and design for different users with different needs.^44–46 Lurkers are the largest group in the online environment, and as such, they neither represent the unconnected nor those who “are out of the loop, socially and otherwise.”⁴⁷ Lurking is not just one aspect of online participation, it is multidimensional online behavior, and research needs to acknowledge the complexity of different forms of online participation. Soroka and Rafaela⁴⁸ suggest understanding online participation in terms of their Social Communication Network (SCN), a model that includes all participants (both active and passive) and all the connections and relationships participation needs to reveal the complexity of online behaviors.

Should the aim always be to increase online participation?

Understanding lurking is central to understanding the social behavior in online social behavior, especially as lurkers do have opinions, ideas, and information that can be of value to the online and offline community.⁴⁹ Ignoring, dismissing, misunderstanding them will distort how we understand online life, as well as leading to mistakes in the way sites and strategies for increasing online and offline participation are organized and designed.

Virtual communities may need a sizable number of members for sustained participation,⁵⁰ but lurking and differences in levels and types of participation are always to be expected and has its functions. Nielsen¹¹ states that participation inequality cannot be overcome, and that “the first step to dealing with participation inequality is to recognize that it will always be with us. It's existed in every online community and multi-user service that has ever been studied.” It is difficult to evaluate the value of participation by counting the number of posts or other activities and trying to convert these into economic quantities. The work by Takahashi et al.^39,40 shows that a clearer understanding of participation and lurking within an online community will allow lurkers to occupy a more important position as a resource. Encouraging a lurker to be a visible participant may not necessarily always be an advantage. Researching the role of the lurkers must not necessarily lead to higher levels of visible participation but reveal how the activities they like to engage in may have benefits for the group, the community, and, in much wider terms, democracy and society.

Conclusion

Defining lurking in positive terms can help provide new perspectives in online research. One serious consequence of misunderstanding lurkers is misunderstanding online environments.

An overview of definitions reveals that lurkers are not only defined in many ways, but that definitions themselves are often contradictory. Even when redefined in positive terms, lurking is often referred to as introverted, passive, or inactive rather than active behavior. Morris and Ogan⁵¹ describe lurkers as readers and at the same time as passive TV viewers. Stegbauer and Rausch⁵ believe that lurkers connect isolated social spaces and passing contents between mailing lists, yet describe this behavior as being passive. Passive behavior implies that participants obtain fewer benefits (e.g. informational) than active participants, and participants can only be either passive or active.⁵²

Some definitions see lurking as acceptable behavior, yet use terms that reflect a more negative approach ranging from harmless and reserved¹³ to “eavesdrop,”⁵³ but also lack of confidence and lack of productivity.⁴⁹ Lurkers have been given less derogatory labels such as “peripheral participants.”⁵⁴ Yet the term “lurker,” even if redefined in more positive terms, seems to have stuck. The definitions still focus on what lurkers are not: not public, not at the center. Such definitions neither adequately describe lurking nor explain why it is important to online participation.¹⁸

Sanders,⁵⁵ on the other hand, suggests defining lurkers as “lovecats,” that is, people who share knowledge freely and with good intent, serving others, facilitating relationship building, and aiding group learning. The online environment relies on different types of users in the online environment. So lurking needs to be seen as a normal behavior to be researched from a number of perspectives, reflecting and identifying the diversity of lurkers, their behaviors, strategies, and needs.

Footnotes

Author Disclosure Statement

No competing financial interests exist.

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