Ton's Interdependent Thoughts: Lurking and Social Networks

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Lurking and Social Networks

While having lunch with Lilia (who gave a great sketch of how our conversation developed) we talked about her new topic of interest, lurking.

Lurking
Lurking, although the word seems to imply a negative connotation, has usefull aspects nonetheless. It is a way of determining rules of behaviour for new comers to a group.

The most obvious characteristic of a lurker is that he�s at the fringe of a group, listening and observing. Being at the fringe may seem like a bad place from the core, but in fact is a good position to build bridges to other groups, and be aware of other groups in the vicinity. In a face to face setting like a pub or a meeting of some kind, a lurker is visible, often shortly introduced after which the focus of attention shifts to the established group members again.

In on-line settings things are different. In some fora lurkers are encouraged to introduce themselves and then adviced to lurk, i.e. observe and learn for a while. But at all times there is no way of knowing how many lurkers are there that you are unaware of.

As lurkers are possible bridges to other groups, I as a blogger, would like to know:

How many lurkers I have, who read my blog but don't comment or post.

Who they are

Serverlogs can give some clues, and I keep a close watch on them. Dave Winer's RSS-tool also brings new info to light.

Weak and Strong Ties
The importance of lurking lies in the fact that they constitute weak ties. Weak ties are where interesting transactions and exchanges can take place. Strong ties imply that all people involved have access to more or less the same information and opportunities so nothing new comes from them.

Looking at social networks, lurkers are probably two or three nodes away (that's how they found my blog presumeably). Most interesting new commenters (de-lurking lurkers) that pop up on my radar screen/blog are coming from that (social) distance.

network with almost only strong ties

Is this mix of strong and weak ties that forms my micro-blogosphere also a major factor of importance if you suffer from the echo-chamber effect? Where strong ties are the source of resonance, and the absence or presence of weak ties determine wether that cluster of strong ties is closed to input from the outside world?

network with strong ties and numerous weak ties, preventing echo chambers

Meshing of Networks
Another angle on this would be looking at the meshing of networks, a well known IT problem; How many meshing do you need to keep up performance of the network when one or more nodes fail.

There are different levels of meshing one can distinguish.

Total meshing: all nodes are connected directly to all other nodes.

Optimal meshing: all nodes are only a few steps away from all other nodes, via multiple possible paths

Sub-optimal meshing: all nodes are only a few steps away from all other nodes, some via only one path (some info might get lost for some nodes, but the network will still perform)

Sparse meshing: not all nodes are connected to all others through a few steps, and a lot only via 1 path. Islands form, connected by a few bridges.

Echo-chambers, my guess is, form most easily in places (groups of blogs) that have total meshing, and have no 'capacity' left to connect to less meshed 'regions' in a network.

Lurkers are in that case nodes in a sub-optimally meshed network. They're there, but you are not necessarily aware of them.

Magic Numbers
Taking it one step further, maybe the 'magic numbers' we see in networks of humans relate these meshing concepts to our mental capacity to juggle social data.

12 being the average capacity to track nodes in a totally meshed network

50 being the average capacity to track nodes in an optimally meshed network

150 being the average capacity to track nodes in a sub-optimally meshed network.

above 150 being the sparsely meshed social network where anonymity and getting lost becomes possible.

If we relate this to blogs and Clay Shirky's power law, teenage diaries blogs are possibly primarily on the 12/total meshing levels, professional content blogs are probably all in the 50 to 150 ranges, with distinct stability levels (my blog went from 0 to 12 inbound blogs then stabilized, then grew to just over fifty inbound blogs and stabilized again.) Above 150 people are more sparsely connected and start looking for beacons or leaders to orient themselves socially. This is the range where the broadcasting type blogs are, the A-listers.

Landscapes
A last and different way to look at Social Networks could be the metaphor of landscapes, with mountains as barriers, and roads and rivers as attractors.
Closely knit groups would be villages, echo-chambers isolated villages with no nearby roads. Larger groups, sub-optimally meshed are towns and cities, where the risk of too little meshing lurks (homeless people, drop outs etc as a consequence). Lurkers might be unnoticed city dwellers, or tourists from other landscapes, that only become visible if they make themselves known as tourists, leave footprints or marks on/in the landscape as it were. (Kilroy was here)

Oh and yeah, we also ate during lunch, not just talked.
The picture below shows my original notes, taken during the lunch :)

UPDATE: Matt starts wondering about tools for lurkers.

Permalink
(posted by Ton Zijlstra at February 4, 2004 07:46 AM)

Postings that link here

Lurking and Social Networks
Excerpt: Ton Zijlstra has some interesting thoughts about how lurking affects networks. This is a discussion in progress. Ton's Interdependent Thoughts: Lurking and Social Networks...
Weblog: Mesh Forum
Tracked: February 5, 2004 04:20 AM

Lurking builds commonality
Excerpt: EEK Speaks writes on Lurkers: Are Lurkers Bad? My answer [to this]: Sometimes. Lurkers are part of a group's latent energy; good things happen when that energy is activated. Lurkers are part of the all-important weak-tie network, and it's important...
Weblog: Knowledge Jolt with Jack
Tracked: February 7, 2004 12:25 AM

Lurkers as potential bridges in social networks
Excerpt: lurking in social netwokrs - not a bad thing, necessarily
Weblog: Headshift
Tracked: February 12, 2004 02:41 AM

BlogWalk Chicago: colorful on white
Excerpt: BlogWalk Chicago was fun :) Jack Vinson
Weblog: Mathemagenic
Tracked: January 23, 2005 06:21 AM

Lurking
Excerpt: Lurking and Social Networks: "The most obvious characteristic of a lurker is that he�s at the fringe of a group, listening and observing. Being at the fringe may seem like a bad place from the core, but in fact is...
Weblog: elearnspace
Tracked: February 28, 2005 04:04 PM

Echokamer
Excerpt: Tijdens zijn presentatie op Reboot ging David Weinberger in op het verwijt dat de schrijvende pers, in dit geval de New York Times, weblogs regelmatig maakt: weblogs wijzen alleen naar zichzelf en elkaar, en zijn dus navelstaarders. Deze twee screensho...
Weblog: Interdependent Thoughts
Tracked: July 12, 2005 04:26 PM

Lurking builds commonality
Excerpt: EEK Speaks writes on Lurkers: "Are Lurkers Bad?" Interesting thoughts about community and shared context with respect to the people who aren't talking out loud.
Weblog: Knowledge Jolt with Jack
Tracked: October 25, 2005 04:27 AM

Comments

Cool diagram!

Here is a picture of our political 'echo chambers'... this book network is a proxy for the social networks behind it.

http://www.orgnet.com/divided.html

Thanks Valdis! That is a great picture of echochambers. (Ton)

Posted by: Valdis at February 4, 2004 04:10 PM

Oops... forgot.

Landscapes... in Cleveland a local Econ Devel orgnaization has a "Landscape Project" to map all of key players [individuals, groups, organizations] involved in economic development in NE Ohio. The networks they will map will include social, business, partnership, investment, ...

From the 'As Is' map they hope to build the 'Could Be' community!

Posted by: Valdis at February 4, 2004 04:16 PM

I'd love to map "our corner" of blogosphere (let's say starting from BlogWalk crowd) to see if our blog reading preferences fit "echo-chamber" or open format...

Posted by: Lilia at February 4, 2004 09:30 PM

for more on magic numbers and the echo chamber ;-)

http://radio.weblogs.com/0114726/2003/02/12.html
http://radio.weblogs.com/0114726/2003/04/09.html#a391

Posted by: Ross Mayfield at February 6, 2004 06:04 AM

Thanks Ross,
While writing this post I remembered your posts as well, but had no time to look them up and add the links. Thanks for adding them yourself.

Posted by: Ton Zijlstra at February 6, 2004 07:50 AM

Thanks for this article.

I am a doctoral student exploring lurking in formal online course discussions. I am finding that lurkers are also learning, albeit differently. Also, I am finding that in the formal ediucation context, when the teachers decide to make discussion participation compulsory, they may be inhibiting lurkers from learning due to many reasons.

I was wondering how the picture would look for an online course in formal HE set up. It may be the same as the one you have drawn for the 'lurker' learner; but different for the teacher, perhaps?

Shalni

Posted by: Shalni at February 13, 2004 10:33 AM

Interesting comments about those on the fringe of an online community. I've been spending the last few weeks working on a project of my own design - investigating online communities and how to deepen interaction and improve dialogue. I'm keeping my research in blog format too, if you're interested [Link]. I've only just started this semester, so the ball isn't rolling that fast yet. :)

I've lurked around a few blogs, mostly just unable to offer any sort of comment because of lack of ideas or just being uninspired. I wonder how it's possible to engage those readers though? One thing I've noticed is that a few pictures go a long way toward getting someone to comment.

Oh, and just so that my "lurking" can benefit both of us, here's how I found my way on to your blog --

http://www.headshift.com/archives/001001.cfm
http://radio.weblogs.com/0120501/

Posted by: John Grillo at February 13, 2004 11:49 AM

This relates to a paper (http://www.critical-learning.co.uk/html/wiki_paper_1.html) I have written with some colleagues about students involvement with a course on-line. Lurking should be seen as 'legitimate peripheral participation' in a community of practice rather than as a problem.

Posted by: David Andrew at February 14, 2004 05:33 PM

Lilia makes a good point. I suspect there is a large element of "echo-chamber" in KM Blogging, but hopefully enough external links to provide interesting (off-beat) leads too.

The encouraging thing here is the focus on the links, not the members. I'm a firm believer in the fact that knowledge is about the characterisation of relationships (in terms of purpose) rather than the snippets / nodes / facts at their ends.

Posted by: ian glendinning at February 24, 2004 09:48 AM

I like your ideas.

Lurking. I must be a lurker.
I just need a piece of information
so I skip through some sites and
take(ideas) what I need.

This is how I got to this unlikely spot.

Google: "points in documentation"

http://excitedutterances.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_excitedutterances_archive.html

http://denham.typepad.com/km/2004/02/documentation_k.html

http://matt.blogs.it/2004/02/13.html#a1321

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:79KRJbCH57gJ:www.zylstra.org/blog/archives/001183.html+lurkers,+%22tools+for+lurkers%22&hl=en

Posted by: Saundra Counce, RN at September 15, 2004 06:27 AM