IRGO is pleased to announce that Dr Jocelyn Cranefield from the University of Victoria will give a seminar next week. The talk is titled “Unmasking the lurker” (abstract below) and will be held on Tuesday 19th April from 12:00 to 1:00 in room CO2.07 of the School of Business.
Here is the abstract:
Invisible members of online communities have traditionally been seen as ‘lurkers’ - inactive, peripheral participants who provide little value to the community. By focusing on visible online interactions, research into online communities risks perpetuating this view. Jocelyn will argue that in today’s complex, multimodal communities, the lurker concept is too simplistic. Based on the findings of a case research project, she presents a view of the community in which online spaces are seen as part of a larger, polycontextual community esosystem made up of diverse online and offline contexts - engagement spaces - with differing degrees of visibility. The nature and value of community roles is understood by focusing on individuals’ boundary-spanning activity within this system. Jocelyn will report on the results of a study of online communities in which a group of “follower-feeders” played a key role in knowledge transfer by crossing the online-offline and visible-invisible community boundaries.
Hope to see many of your there!
(Source: irgo.otago.ac.nz)
