Abstract not found

The asymmetry of activity in virtual communities is of great interest. While participation in the activities of virtual communities is crucial for a community's survival and development, many people prefer lurking, that is passive attention over active participation. Lurking can be measured and perhaps affected by both dispositional and situational variables. This work investigates the concept of cultural capital as situational antecedent of lurking and de-lurking (the decision to start posting after a certain amount of lurking time). Cultural capital is defined as the knowledge that enables an individual to interpret various cultural codes. The main hypothesis states that a user's cultural capital affects her level of activity in a community and her decision to de-lurk and cease to exist in very active communities because of information overload. This hypothesis is analyzed by mathematically defining a social communication network (SCN) of activities in authenticated discussion forums. We validate this model by examining the SCN using data collected in a sample of 636 online forums in Open University in Israel and 2 work based communities from IBM. The hypotheses verified here make it clear that fostering receptive participation may be as important and constructive as encouraging active contributions in online communities.

Invisible members of online communities; those who access, but do not post material, have traditionally been conceived of as being inactive, peripheral, non-productive participants. The term lurker connotes a poorly understood, low-value and marginal role, characterised by a reluctance, or lack of readiness, to contribute. This paper argues that in today‟s complex, multimodal online communities, the lurker concept is too simplistic. Combining the concept of polycontextuality with boundary spanning theory, it proposes an alternative way of conceptualising invisible online roles. It reports on a study investigating knowledge transfer in online communities, where a subset of influential and active, yet „invisible ‟ online participants was discovered. These participants, follower-feeders, spanned the online-offline community boundary, acting as online followers and offline leaders. They communicated with