On any public discussion list, in addition to the frequent posters who participate regularly in the daily discussions, there are members who participate in the list experience by reading only without posting. These list members are called "lurkers."
Near the end of April 1993, my comparative analysis of the Cinema-L membership rosters and daily records of the participants and messages led me to the dawning realization that the majority of Cinema-L list members were participating as lurkers. I asked the lurkers to speak out and tell the rest of the list who they were, what they were getting out of the list experience, and why they were lurking instead of posting. The public groundswell of enthusiasm generated by the lurkers' "coming-out" experience led to an increased sense of list pride and identity that was unheralded during any other aspect of Phase I of my research.
Who "Speaks" on Cinema-L: The Numbers
Throughout the month of April 1993, in addition to conducting interviews off-list, I analyzed the quantifiable aspects of the LISTSERV: total number of subscribers, number of messages per day, number of members posting messages--or "posters"--per day; and the gender distribution of subscribers, messages, and posters. [27] The detailed statistics I compiled can be found in Appendices J and K; some general comments related to these numbers follow.
On three separate occasions throughout the month I obtained a membership list for Cinema-L from the LISTSERV that manages the list. On average, the Cinema-L roster listed approximately 320 "revealed" members whose names could be accessed publicly by sending a "review" command to the LISTSERV, 17 LISTSERVs or bulletin boards which could be accessed by the general public, and 11 "concealed" members whose names would not be included in a membership list generated by sending the "review" command. I excluded the LISTSERVs and the concealed members, and compiled statistics based on the list members whose names were available to me. I assumed, for practical purposes, that every John, Doug, or Roger was male; and that every Carol, Julie, or Diane was female. On average, 36 percent of the members were women; 52 percent were men; and 12 percent were people from whose names, as listed, it was impossible to discern gender.
I examined a total of 1221 Cinema-L messages over the course of 30 days, for a daily average of 41 messages. Cinema-L is a fairly high-volume list, comparatively speaking. I was surprised to discover that, of the several hundred subscribers on the LISTSERV, only a few dozen individuals generally posted messages each day. The number of daily contributors varied from 2 to 38, with the average number of contributors on any given day in April 1993 being 21. What were the other 300 or so people doing? Obviously, an overwhelming number of Cinema-L members were not posting. They were, instead, lurking (or "lurkers," as in "those who lurk at the fringes, seldom or never posting messages to the list"). Although it was not obvious that they were there listening in, the silent majority of Cinema-L was participating silently at the edges of the group, reading but not writing.
Each day I noted which individual was the "top poster," the person who had posted the most messages that day. The number of messages contributed by the top poster ranged from 5 to 10 messages per day, with the all-time high during the month of April being 13 messages posted by one person in the same day. Top posters during April 1993 were, on every occasion, male.
Twenty-three percent of the daily messages were from women. Seventy-five percent of the messages were from men. The remaining messages were posted by people who used only initials, or whose names could have been either gender. On any given day, however, 31 percent of the posters were female and 66 percent of the posters were male. The female list members who did post were contributing fewer messages per person than male list members were.
Lurking was thus the most popular means of participating (through partial non-participating) in Cinema-L discussions, especially for female list members. Researcher Gladys We (1993) has reported similarly low rates of participation by women on many other social Usenet newsgroups.
Near the end of the month, I presented my data to the group and invited Cinema-L members to offer their own explanations of the statistics I had compiled. The message I sent appears in Appendix E. In that message, which I wrote on the evening of April 22 and which appeared on the list on April 23 (a Friday), I first listed a few of the statistics I had been compiling. I then asked two questions of the Cinema-L readers: Why is it that so few women post (percentage-wise)? And why is it that on any given day so few Cinema-L members post, while the others remain silent? I identified the phenomenon as "lurking" ("lurking" was a subject that had just been discussed in some depth on another list I belonged to at the time) and asked lurkers to contact me on or off the list.
At that point a number of things happened. Several people commented on my question about the gender difference. Sergio replied,
Batten down the hatches, folks, here it comes--a rousing flamewar about the deep-rooted sexism of male hegemony over cyberspace. Or could it be--he said with great reluctance, fearing the worst--could there be just a one in a gazillion chance that men are, on the whole, more aggressive than women?
Sofia, who identified herself to me off-list as a "self-confessed Lurker-sometime-Poster," replied publicly to his post:
Aggression has nothing to do with it! It has been said that women gab on and on in conversations while men are less inclined to do so. I say that men are gabbers too, maybe even worse than women, they just haven't found the right venue. Well NO MORE! My thinking is this: (are you getting this Anita?) Men like toys. Computers are toys. E-mail lists are games you can play with the toys. In addition, most workplaces offer access to E-mail for little or no cost. Therefore, in this age of electronic, voiceless communication sans eye-contact, men are coming into their own. The statistics prove it (see Anita's earlier post). I soon foresee a complete gender-shift for the responsibilities of gabbing in our society. Are we prepared?
A male lurker suggested,
There is a train of thought that states that men will tend to dominate discussion spaces. We supposedly have been trained to speak up and make sure that we are heard, and therefore we're less shy to pop up and throw in our 2-cents worth.
The same person admitted to lurking on the list during the two weeks since he had joined, and he explained "I just thought that it might be good manners to listen in for a while before barging in. . . . "
Three other female lurkers spoke up on the list that day, and offered explanations as to why they were lurking. Here is how one of them described the experience of being "caught" lurking:
Something strange just happened. I was walking down this dark alley with my binoculars, anonymous against the grey wall, when suddenly . . .
SHWOOOOSH! SHWOOOSH! SHWOOOSH! (that's supposed to mimic the sound of big spotlights being turned on)
I was blinded by 3 bright sources of light. :-O Ahhhh!
I froze, feeling very small in my grey raincoat (especially needed this week), or should I say, very naked in my grey raincoat.
"YOU!" I heard in a loud voice, a female loud voice.
"Whoooooo? Meeeeee?" I squeequily [sic] responded, trembling and suddenly sweating in my grey raincoat, feeling smaller and smaller, bowing, crawling, ready to confess whatever I have to confess . . .
"Yes, YOU, WE know about YOU!"
"Meeeeee? Nooooooo, I did not do it! What did I dooooooo?"
"You were LURKING!"
I got down on my knees. My binoculars dropped. They did not break. Good.
"Yes!" I answered in a low, almost breathless voice. "I was. I confess. And I enjoyed every minute of it . . . "
:->
This particular self-admitted "lurker" later explained, "Maybe I just never got the guts to send that first post. Maybe I thought I could not rival the wit and wisdom of the regulars . . . ;-)"
Faith, another lurker who posted to the list that day, offered, "By the time I get to read my E-mail, usually after 10 p.m. [ . . . ], all the good stuff has been said." This former lurker posted a total of three messages that day, one explaining why she was lurking and two sharing her opinions on film-related issues. Faith later explained, in a longer message which she sent directly to me off-list, that there were four reasons why she didn't post more often:
Yet another lurker said she had just joined the list and had not posted yet because she had been "just reading the messages and trying to get my bearings." This former lurker also posted a second message, giving her opinion on an issue that had come up on the list that day.
A woman who identified herself as a "lurker-occasional contributor" explained that she didn't post for two reasons:
She also explained why she enjoyed Cinema-L: "The humor is fabulous, watching or participating in the group dynamics (without any real life consequences) is fascinating, and it's just plain fun." In a second message, she asked "Who came up with this term 'lurkers' anyway? It sounds so . . . unsavory. Imagine if all 350 of us threw our 2 cents in every day--ye gods."
Bill, one of the Cinema-L regulars who usually posted several messages per day, suddenly realized afresh the "on-stage performance" aspect of sending a message to the list: "Wow, up to 350 lurkers? I feel so self-conscious!"
An occasional poster identified herself among the lurkers--although one could argue that a true, hard-core lurker NEVER speaks, even when spoken to--and suggested that she was "in favor of unearthing past greats in order to make new ones."
A male lurker posted a message in which he stated that "the reason I don't post more messages is because I have no wish to impose my opinions on intelligent people . . . " and then he listed some long, articulate responses to several themes that had been running on the list that week. Four of the Cinema-L regulars welcomed this newcomer, and requested that he feel free to post his opinion more often.
It was Friday. Lurker consciousness on the list rose. On Friday evening I posted a message to the list reviewing The Rapture; as an aside, I thanked all of the lurkers who had contributed to that day's discussion, and I repeated my plea for more lurkers to speak out, either on or off the list. By Monday lurking (or "de-lurking," or "coming out," as one former lurker had put it on Friday) had become a full-scale movement.
On Monday, April 26, the first week day after my "lurkers" posting, 98 messages were posted to the list--the highest number of messages posted to the list during any other day of the month of April 1993! This number was more than twice the overall average of 41 messages per day. The previous Friday, the day of the actual "lurkers" posting, 38 different list members had posted--the highest number of posters who had contributed to the discussion on any day that month.
On Monday, William, a former lurker, posted a message to the list titled "Lurkers, Unite!" He said,
This group--of all the newsgroups I read regularly--has the most entertaining, witty, considerate (yet opinionated), and in total most fun collection of posters of all [ . . . . ] I love to read cinema-l in the mornings.
List pride reached an all-time high. A Cinema-L regular seconded William's opinion: "I'd just like to agree with you [ . . . ] that Cinema-L is the most interesting list. I've been on others and they don't rate."
Faith, a lurker who had spoken out on Friday, contributed this opinion:
While we are extolling the wonders of Cinema-L, and why we like to lurk here, it is because the conversation is always interesting. My fanaticism has gotten to the point that when a work-related posting is lodged in the middle of an on-going commentary, I get annoyed. How dare they!
Not all of the lurkers were happy campers, however; one lurker who contacted me privately off-list had this to say:
I subscribed a few weeks ago to see what sort of discussion went on--quite frankly I find a lot of it boring and/or irrelevant. Much of it is too general to be of much interest. I'm thinking about unsubscribing [ . . . ] I don't think being female has anything to do with not posting, I've just never really had the time. Some of the time somebody's already made comments of a similar nature to anything I'd have said in response to posts. (I'm on the other side of the Atlantic so I'm like half a day behind your debates.) Other times, I find the level of debate so inflammatory I'd rather not waste my "pearls of wisdom" on the flamers. (Flaming may be a more masculine/macho activity, I don't know--perhaps you should examine the gender of this. Perhaps it contributes to the reticence of female members.)
A former lurker who identified herself as a "lurkess" in a message to the list titled "Female Postpersons, Lurkess, Stats . . . " pointed out (in regard to the statistics I had posted):
Of those females who have access to mainframes and who subscribe to networks, a good (interesting word chosen) percentage are in positions (e.g., student, data entry) which are closely monitored, which limit "free time" at a terminal, and which preclude little more than a QUICK perusal of the netlog. (Unlike all those tenured male profs :-) whose activities are never :-) monitored, and who, thus, spend hours composing brilliant and generally substantive posts.) So many are relegated to the ranks of lurker/ess.
Note the use of emoticons to soften a statement that the poster thinks may be construed as a flame by others.
The word "lurkess" was coopted by a Cinema-L regular, and became "lurkeuse." Several lurkers, and lurkeuses, identified themselves and were openly welcomed into the discussion by Cinema-L regulars. Common themes among lurkers were:
A few of the lurkers who "came out" on Friday began posting regularly on film-related topics the following Monday. Whether former lurkers continue to be posters over the long run remains to be seen. Posting may be just a passing fad for a true lurker.
While temporary lurking during early phases of list membership is considered good online etiquette and a helpful way to avoid an unwarranted flame war, for many longtime list members lurking becomes a way of life. Lurkers who spoke out on the list or who contacted me privately indicated that their silence could be attributed to a number of factors. Many lacked the time to post, but enjoyed reading others' comments. Others were simply not interested enough in the ongoing discussion to initiate a conversation or respond to other posters' comments. Several lurkers identified logistical barriers to their more active participation: they lacked sufficient access or unstructured free time at a computer during their work day to compose messages. Some shared a computer or worked in a closely supervised area where they believed that spending time on such seemingly "non-work-related" activities would be frowned upon.
For other lurkers the anonymity of the environment was perceived as a source of safety, and anxiety was associated with "speaking" in the one-to-many environment without immediate feedback--confirming the "performance" aspect of electronic communication via a LISTSERV noted by interview participants--either for fear of seeming unknowledgeable to others whom the lurker perceived as "experts" on the topic, or for fear of being flamed. Lurking was in many cases correlated with gender: female list members were more likely to lurk, and to identify one of the reasons for their silence as fear of flame wars. Several participants in the on-list discussion generated by my query to the lurkers indicated that technological toys, and therefore technological environments such as discussion lists, were perceived as yet another gendered province, where male participants dominated discussion spaces and directed the conversation.