In social media systems, there are many different users and many different ways of using the systems. And often, users tend to go through multiple different types of use at different stages in their use of the system. These stages can form a life-cycle of participation. We do not test the existence of life-cycle stages, but rather assume that this life-cycle exists and are more interested in characterizing the different types of use in these stages.
We begin by looking at how most users begin: lurking, or observing the community without participating. As Nonnecke and Preece have repeatedly shown, lurkers are an important part of any community because they provide a large audience for everyone else. We use a survey to understand differences between registered users of Everything2, a social media website, and anonymous visitors of the site.
Next, we look at one way that people who do contribute information use the system: to facilitate collaboration. We are studying how users of Facebook use the system to facilitate collaboration with others. We begin with a survey of student users of Facebook to look at how they use Facebook to organize and develop collaborations related to classes. We then move on to a some semi-structured interviews of non-student Facebook users to better understand how Facebook affects collaboration outside of the academy. We are still collecting and analyzing data, but one interesting preliminary result is that instructors might be able to encourage student collaboration by having a presence on Facebook.
Finally, we are studying how and why users end their use of the system. How do frequent contributors (or one-time contributors, or lurkers) decide to stop using the site, stop contributing, and (presumably) move on to other things? We are conducting semi-structure interviews with users who were formerly heavy contributors to Everything2 but have since stopped using the site to better understand how and why the exit decision is made. We then combine this data with log data analysis to develop a picture of the end of the life-cycle of participation.
We are also interested in two additional types of participation but have not yet begun studying them. First, how does a user first decide to create an account and start contributing to a social media system? This is the stage where a user moves from lurker to active participant, and that “participate” decision is currently poorly understood. Second, most large social media systems rely on users to perform some amount of “governance” of the site. For example, all of Wikipedia’s many policies have been decided upon by groups of end users. How and why does a user decide to participate in the governance of a social media system, and how does this decision affect his other uses — reading and contributing normal content — of the site?
The work on collaboration is join with Cliff Lampe, Nicole Ellison, Jessica Vitak, and Yvette Wohn. The work studying Everything2 is joint with Cliff Lampe, Tor Bjornrud, Alcides Velasquez, and Elif Yilmaz.
Resources:
Cliff Lampe, Rick Wash, Alcides Velasquez, and Elif Yilmaz. “Motivations to Participate in Online Communities.” Under Submission. September, 2009.