A silent shout out
Writing for a silent majority or spirited community?
Blogging, it would seem, can lead to meaningful relationships, shared interests, spirited dialogue: all features important to developing a genuine community. Though a sense of community might exist for some writers, many others find that their contributions to the world of online discourse fall on deaf ears and blind eyes
Eric Bronson1
Photo by Thiébaud Faix on Unsplash
The first season of my podcast Psychologically Speaking delves into the behaviour that sits with and behind Imposter Phenomenon, todays blog is a companion piece of sorts to episodes 2 and 3 which feature lurking, the behaviour that arrived through the front door of internet chat rooms without announcement, with no requirement for a real name this was the anonymous pre-selfie era. Early internet chat spaces and blogs with sparse technical features provided discreet ways for people to watch the world unfold with the minimum of participation.
The description of lurking sees it associated with some sinister motive which is intriguing to me and many other psychologists, we know through historical accounts that the behaviour of being a bystander in online spaces was considered impolite at first, a judgement that still lingers to some extent. Fortunately, the psychological literature around lurking has moved along with the digital times2, but we are still mostly in the dark as writers around the motivations of our silent majority.
It's useful to think about the way our interactions on the internet have been shaped by technical developments and the maturity of features, Facebook turns 20 in February 2024, and it has undoubtedly changed the type of information we share, it popularised putting a face (or photo) to a real name, and we have been observing often engaging in each other’s lives through it’s platform that gives us space to post in permanent and temporary ways. Facebook is a space where we have learned to lurk, life events are woven into the fabric of the network news we consume, and I can’t help but compare this behaviour to the way my Grandma would scan ‘the despatches’ of births, deaths and marriages in the local evening paper. Rather than pathologizing our use of the internet, it’s a useful reminder that our online behaviour is essentially an extension of our everyday lives. The cyberpsychologist Linda Kaye used the phrase ‘digitally-connected human experience’ in a recent article3, and I like this fusion of words which lends itself to the involvement that takes place whether we see it or not.
If you still use Facebook, or Instagram in a personal way I imagine there are people who you have not interacted with in person for a long time (or perhaps ever), but you probably know a bit about their lives, or at least the bits they choose to share with you on the internet. We are deeply social and drawn to the temporal markers of key life events, mini digital biographical sketches if you like, that sit rent free in our heads. The intriguing thing for me is the way we think and judge silent interaction in online spaces.
I quoted Eric Bronson’s essay on ‘The Lurking Class’ in the opening, it contrasts online readers to descriptions of postal workers who he describes as ‘stuck on the fringes of someone else's discourse’, even the title suggests that lurking behaviour is sub-standard in the participation stakes, Bronson reminds us that lurking is something that has always existed as a social act with a dose of judgement.
There are various definitions of lurking in the cyberpsychology literature, which attempt to quantify silent participation into sometimes, rarely, or never type behaviour. I like the discussion by psychologists Popovac and Fullwood4 that asks us to consider the social norms associated with the group or space when thinking about the frequency and type of participation. As identified in my own research, online context shapes the behaviour we see, and this is an area I discuss in episode 3 around the idea of psychological safety in online spaces with guests Christina Clark and Laura Stearn. I’m adopting a broad application of the term lurking, because as my research finds, women who lurk, do gain from silent participation.
Continuing with the train of thought that we are all super social people, I’m going to refer to Jane Austen. I‘ve been re-watching the BBC mini-series from the 1990’s of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I love it for many reasons, not least because I read feminine, feminist and female literature for my A-level English coursework, contrasting the characters in Austen, Atwood and Murdoch books, having a VHS study companion made light work of the task at hand. I particularly loved the way that in the adaptation Mrs Bennet has developed into an outrageous and exaggerated caricature from the book, whereas the not so subtle eyebrow raising from Elizabeth Bennet let’s us know that she is watching and judging all around her.
It made me wonder how Austen’s characters might behave in an online space or community. I think that Lydia would make the most use of selfie’s, Charlotte strikes me as the type of person who might post factual updates and I know that I would be muting Mr Collin’s pompous posts in a heartbeat. It’s curious isn’t it, to think about the cast of characters who comment or not, on our social world?, in episode 2 of my podcast I explain how this unfolds as anxiety around imagined audiences within the context of Imposter Phenomenon.5
At the heart of my research the psychological concept of context collapse6 and social identity theory7 help to explain behaviour in online communities, social identity theory sets out a process of categorisation, identification and comparison as ways in which we make sense of our environment, but these processes also lead to stereotypical views. A lurker is someone we do not know, but we categorise them as different to people who we do know (at least virtually), we might identify them using whatever digital markers we have at our disposal, but our appraisal could lead to the view that they are like us, or not like us.
Austen’s fictional characters provide a frame for us to think about the people behind our posts and blogs who are silent, and they are the majority. Some estimates suggest that 70-80% of activity in social spaces is passive in nature, a surprisingly small percentage of readers contribute by comment. It’s easy to forget this, especially when our social spaces are geared up to capture participation moments through likes, shares, restacks and replies and again this is nothing new in the way we behave socially.
Take newspaper sales, I worked in a newsagents at weekends at around the same time I was watching Pride and Prejudice on the BBC for the first time, there was something really tangible about the sale or return model of newspaper print. We knew from week to week which titles were trending, in which areas, (the Sunday routes with the big houses would be a heavy load!) and which obscure titles our customers would order in, there was always less chat with these customers than our regulars who would pick up the Sunday paper or evening news, and make a comment about the headline, perhaps we forget that deep interest in a subject doesn’t always equal a social commentary.
Unlike a shop where we’d see the people behind the footfall, online consumption usually hides behind a unique IP or email address, it’s interesting that this platform has created a way for us to understand the referral pathway our readers to take to our publications, and another technical feature enables the creation of ‘in and out groups’ as a by-product of the subscription model. In and out groups surround us, through sports teams, our nationalities, and cultural identities, what we see online is merely an extension of socialness.
Our desire and engagement with tools that seek to uncover the silent majority makes me wonder if we’ve become uncomfortable with silent consumption. From scanning loyalty cards at a supermarket to a substack subscription, digital breadcrumbs are everywhere. Psychologically speaking we are starting to use the terminology of active and passive engagement to explain the way in which humans interact in online social media space, and this is helping us to understand behaviour in a more nuanced way8. The term lurking, despite it’s sinister origin is likely to stay because it conjures up an image for something so inherently intangible.
In episode 2 of my podcast we hear from one of my research participants Chloe who tells us about the deep value she got from a silent participation in an online community. Research like mine is starting to help us lift the lid on lurking and the motivations that sit behind it, I’ve written this companion piece because we are all in a space where we are interacting with a silent majority, and I thought you might find it useful to consider if you relate to ‘imagined audiences’.
I used Austen’s characters as an example today to bring individuality into this piece around lurking, it’s common to lump the silent majority under the label, and to consider that in doing so we ‘other them’ pushing them into a space on the periphery, and this is one of the challenges with imagined audiences they go from being individual people to a group that is synonymous with some ulterior motive.
Over to you, with a prompt from Eric Bronsons essay, he suggests that spirited dialogue is an element of ‘a genuine community’ which is not felt by all writers, and I wonder if you agree?
p.s I’ll delve into the idea of the psychological sense of community (and sense of virtual community) in a future blog.
References for today’s blog and a deeper dive
Bronson, E. (2017). The Lurking Class: From Parasocial Postal Clerks to Hypersocial Vloggers. Philosophy and Literature, 41(1), 16–30. https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2017.0001
Han, J. Y., Hou, J., Kim, E., & Gustafson, D. H. (2014). Lurking as an Active Participation Process: A Longitudinal Investigation of Engagement with an Online Cancer Support Group. Health Communication, 29(9), 911–923. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2013.816911
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/what-do-you-want-be-known-social-media [accessed 3rd January 2024]
Popovac, & Fullwood, C. (2019). The Psychology of Online Lurking. In A. Attrill-Smith, C. Fullwood, M. Keep, & D.-J. Kuss, In The Oxford Handbook of Cyberpsychology (pp. 1-25). Oxford University Press. https://doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198812746.013.18
Stsiampkouskaya, K., Joinson, A., Piwek, L., & Stevens, L. (2021). Imagined Audiences, Emoticons, and Feedback Expectations in Social Media Photo Sharing. Social media + society, July-Septemner, 1-19. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211035692
Davidson, & Joinson, A. N. (2021). Shape Shifting Across Social Media. Social Media + Society, 7(1), 205630512199063. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305121990632
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. Austin, & S. Worchel, The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33-37). Monterey : Brooks/Cole.
Zhang, Y., Shi, S., Guo, S., Chen, X., & Piao, Z. (2021). Audience management, online turbulence and lurking in social networking services: A transactional process of stress perspective. International Journal of Information Management, 56, 102233-. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2020.102233