The term, lurker, is frequently used pejoratively and usually refers to anyone who never posts or posts infrequently. In fact, lurking is non-public participation. Lurking is a situated action, and many personal and group-, work-, and tool-related factors affect the activities and level of public and non-public participation. Lurking is ‘normal†in the sense that everyone is likely to be a lurker at some point in time. Lurkers are heterogenous in most respects except in their lack of public posting. Therefore, in the absence of an understanding of the context in which it takes place, lurker is a meaningless term. Avoidance of the term lurker is recommended. Instead, the term ‘non-public participant†(NPP) is suggested. NPP is not pejorative and suggests there are other forms of valid participation outside of public posting.

Bimber and his colleagues (Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl, 2005) has recently completed a work focused on reconceptualizing collective action theory, arguing collective action in the contemporary media environment be based on the principle of boundary-crossing between private and public domains. While this is beneficial in informing research and studies done on lurking, there are also other interesting propositions. Iâ€d like to propose two of them, and will use some examples to explain them:

1. That the phenomena of lurking, or rather, non-public participation is diluted by a convergence in media applications
2. Peer to peer technologies can be instrumental to convert non-public participation to public-participation.

Posting to blogs, forums, bookmarking a link on del.icio.us, Facebook, or the act of contributing entries to Wikipedia range from private to public spheres, and some of these applications exist in between. For example, a post on a blog may be perceived to be a private action, while a Wikipedia entry may be seen as relatively more ‘public†than a blog posting. Other applications such as del.icio.us, enable actions to traverse between the private and public spheres recursively and quickly, and some of such actions may be unconscious. A private bookmark may be added using del.icio.us, but when posted, it contributes to a public sphere of bookmarks with similar tags. While users are usually conscious that their actions contribute to private interests, they may be unconscious that they are contributing to a public sphere. There is another dimension to this convergence. Knowledge that has been acquired from one application such as a forum or a wiki, may also lead to the impetus for further knowledge to be contributed on other media applications. Perhaps someone has been seen to be ‘lurking†or not publicly participating in a forum – but he may be posting frequently to his blog or contributing bookmarks to del.icio.us. Or the opposite may be true: the contributions of a prolific public participant may be a result of a prolonged period of non-public participation. In these examples, peer to peer technologies can be instrumental to convert a non-public participation into a public one.

Lurking has often been tagged with the label of ‘free-riding†in the pursuit of private interests, explaining the lack of public participation. My proposition is that with the convergence of media applications, social networking sites and peer to peer technologies, the distinctions between public and non-public participation are no longer clear.

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The most effective campaign, however, was his use of ‘Wiki Defense’ – where he posted 370 pages of his test documents online, allowing anyone to read and edit comments on the test results. This had attracted other experts of drug testing, scientists (yes, even from NASA), and sympathy from the public. The success of Landis’ use of ‘Wiki Defense’ has led to a number of outcomes:

• Re-examination of drug testing, revealing a series of problems with the protocols and procedures involved.
• Different standards used by various laboratories on accepted ‘normal range’.
• Challenged assumptions of scientific integrity of laboratory testing.
• Began a series of criticisms about today’s mainstream media and journalism.

To me, this is one of the many developments of peer production – where the model is significantly changing our physical landscape and more importantly, the way we consume information, and the level of discernment exercised in the process.

Landis’ ‘Wiki Defense’ can be found at: http://landiscase.wikispaces.com/

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Obviously, there is much to ponder about, not just for cultural institutions (old and new), but also for anyone working in the information industry. I’d recommend the following video, which captures highlights of the 2006 conference. The 2007 conference has ended a couple of months ago.

Click here for video

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I hated the sound of that. But reality bites. Teaching youths in the ‘at-risk’ classes did prove to be challenging. To go into those classes you’d have to first deal with students’ perceptions that teachers were not interested in them anyway, because they have inferior academic abilities. It was especially difficult trying to get them interested in learning, because many of them think that teachers were not interested in them. It struck me then, that we’ve been dehumanizing our curriculum – into tasks – so much that we have forgotten the point of learning. Why were we trying to get youths to learn, to complete tasks, all for the purpose of a better life and becoming a better person, yet we try to fulfill this goal in such mechanical ways?

I set out to do a study involving two classes I was teaching back then. At the start of the year I asked the kids to form peer groups with people they were most comfortable with. Not just for study, I told them – as I believe that personal development was all part of peer learning. After the first peer groups were formed, I brought them out on a picnic and that’s when those isolated got included in certain groups. Peer groups became bigger, and they became peer networks of support, with ‘at-risk’ youths diffusing into other groups. Six months down the road, I used a video camera to record the outcomes. The recorded sessions were based on groups gathered to prepare for upcoming exams. Here are some of the findings:

• Emotional interactions were necessary as part of learning. Youths were able to express themselves with their peers. Where face-to-face interactions were absent, communication devices were used, such as mobile phones and online messengers.
• Learning resources had to be held in common for peer learning to be effective.
• Peer learning groups develop their own vocabularies over time, making up interpretive schemes to refer to resources and events that were of significance to them.
• Boundaries were necessary, especially in the initial formation of the peer group, and in the ways work spaces were bounded: in common with members of the group.
• There were direct and indirect motivations for being in the peer group. Some were there with the goal to pursue learning, others were there simply because they wanted to belong. Regardless of the motivations, there was usually a common goal when they come together to cooperate – which ultimately led to learning.
• Peer learning seem to warrant less formal roles – there is higher interdependence on one another which implied higher levels of involvement. Still, some facilitation was necessary, even if informal.
• Interestingly, gender was a factor shaping the nature of interactions in peer learning groups.

My short contract stint at the school made me realise that richer contextual models by which we provide perspectives on learning were necessary. Even if well-established, traditional teaching methods have to be re-examined, and if necessary, discarded. The use of peer learning worked for me back then, when giving up on the ‘at-risk’ and isolated youths (who perceived themselves as academically incompetent) was not an option. The greatest benefit I found was how this model could bring together a community, with resources held together in common, so effectively. When this was clear to the youths, they participated.

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It brings together multiple disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, cognitive science, and engineering. What I found particularly rewarding was the report’s recommendations on the different areas of collaboration between various disciplines.

The report also gives us something to think about, on what creativity/innovation means in different contexts. An extract from the report reads:

“Creativity involves the introduction of new variables, significant leaps, and novel connections. A subset of creativity, innovation, involves the creation of a new idea but also involves its implementation, adoption, and transfer. Innovation and discovery transform insight and technology into novel products, processes, and services that create value for stakeholders and society. Innovations and discoveries are the tangible outcomes. Creativity is needed to produce these outcomes. Innovation and discovery processes should be formal processes that harness creativity to those ends.

From a product perspective, creativity usually reflects aspects of novelty and/or utility of the products. From a process perspective, creativity involves the social, cognitive, and/or physical processes situated in individual, team, and organization contexts that repeatably produce innovative products. Creative outcomes can occur through serendipity, but it is the creative processes that regularly produce creative outcomes.”

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• Library 2.0, a vision that libraries are working towards, must look out of the library for guidelines to actions
• It’s not about getting people through the door
• There are the purposeful user, and the ‘purpose-less’ wanderer
• Users are also your most valuable contributers
• Librarians should start playing with library users – it’s all about trust and dialogues
• Expect spaces to be transformed. Both physical and digital

And here’s a librarian’s manifesto: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZblrRs3fkSU

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You might have already heard of Muhammad Yunus, recipient of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. His micro-credit banking model has helped millions of people in their struggle against poverty. His story is inspiring:

I became involved in the poverty issue not as a policymaker or a researcher. I became involved because poverty was all around me, and I could not turn away from it. In 1974, I found it difficult to teach elegant theories of economics in the university classroom, in the backdrop of a terrible famine in Bangladesh. Suddenly, I felt the emptiness of those theories in the face of crushing hunger and poverty. I wanted to do something immediate to help people around me, even if it was just one human being, to get through another day with a little more ease. That brought me face to face with poor people’s struggle to find the tiniest amounts of money to support their efforts to eke out a living. I was shocked to discover a woman in the village, borrowing less than a dollar from the money-lender, on the condition that he would have the exclusive right to buy all she produces at the price he decides. This, to me, was a way of recruiting slave labor.

I decided to make a list of the victims of this money-lending “business” in the village next door to our campus. When my list was done, it had the names of 42 victims who borrowed a total amount of US $ 27. I offered US $ 27 from my own pocket to get these victims out of the clutches of those money-lenders. The excitement that was created among the people by this small action got me further involved in it. If I could make so many people so happy with such a tiny amount of money, why not do more of it?

That is what I have been trying to do ever since. The first thing I did was to try to persuade the bank located in the campus to lend money to the poor. But that did not work. The bank said that the poor were not creditworthy. After all my efforts, over several months, failed I offered to become a guarantor for the loans to the poor. I was stunned by the result. The poor paid back their loans, on time, every time! But still I kept confronting difficulties in expanding the program through the existing banks. That was when I decided to create a separate bank for the poor, and in 1983, I finally succeeded in doing that. I named it Grameen Bank or Village bank. (Nobel Foundation, http://nobelpeaceprize.org/eng_lect_2006b.html)

This model goes even further, with examples like Kiva, a micro-finance peer-to-peer loaning business. For as little as US$25, a loan can be made through Kiva to an entrepreneur in the developing world. What’s also interesting is that the entrepreneur, or a local rep, would also help blog about the progress of the loan. Through closely-knitted networks made possible by the Internet, Kiva makes micro-finance highly affordable.

I think there is immense potential still, to be unearthed with Web 2.0, media technologies (think mobile blog, digital cameras, just to name a few) – all of which can be explored using the P2P model. What is most beneficial, to me, is how transparent this can be.

A case in point: the National Kidney Foundation used to be one of the most successful charity organisations in Singapore. By ‘successful’ I mean that it has an impressive track record of raising billions with every fund-raising campaign. Deep in many of us, we wonder how the funds are managed. There were rumours in the grapevines, of the CEO flying first-class and employees getting months of bonuses. I remember my days as a reporter for a community newspaper in Singapore – and there was once I had to cover a story on how the Foundation helped some of its beneficiaries. Visited the office for some interviews and can’t help gaping at the beautiful office and furnishings. All the time wondering if my monthly donations had been used to pay for them.

I was not the only one. But this is where the media is a winner with its manipulation. Images of suffering kidney patients on television. I could not get past them. It took another media giant to expose the Foundation. The national paper took the Foundation to court when it sued the paper for slander in a news report suggesting the misuse of funds. Guess who won?

I’m an optimist when it comes to the Internet and potentials of P2P. Sure; nothing is ever foolproof – but between the institution and the network, I’d trust the network anytime. I’m not suggesting that the institution is redundant – but I think the network is essential to provide the organic accountability lacking in some institutions.

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This post do not attempt to define ‘culture’ in any way – but aims to argue for the benefits of the peer to peer model as a guidepost for collective action especially for cultural institutions.

Giddens calls the cumulative effects of people living and working in social frameworks (a dynamic he termed structuration) the production and re-production of culture. In this he implies a recursive effect by which cultural contexts are continuously generated and re-generated through the interplay of action and structure. He calls this the ‘duality of structure’. In essense, structuration theory holds that ‘man actively shapes the world he lives in at the same time as it shapes him’ (Giddens, 1982, p. 21).

Hofstede (2001) found similar things in a cross-cultural study of IBM, arguing that ‘societal norms shape institutions which in their turn reinforce societal norms…Institutions reflect minds and vice versa’ (Hofstede, 2001, p. 20).
This is important for cultural institutions to recognise as they fulfil their core purpose of promoting the disciplines they represent (such as arts, education, sciences, history) and making meaning for the communities they serve. The cultural institution is influencing and influencing by, recursively, by the national culture formed by local communities, the global culture shaped by people’s minds, and the cultural phenomena of cultural institutions. These factors are in turn shaping and shaped by each other, again in a recursive way. This is represented in the illustration below.

By no means an exhaustive picture – this illustration has been simplified for the purpose of discussion. How can the peer to peer model guide cultural institutions to fulfil their missions? For one, there is no selection criteria for participation in peer to peer projects. Cultural institutions frequently face the challenge of reaching out to infrequent users (I call them the ‘hard-to-reach’ groups). The capacity to engage is contained in the process of engagement – an attractive point of entry for people and an effective method of inclusion for the cultural institution.

There is the occasional misunderstanding that the P2P model is ‘structure-less and hierarchy-less’ (Bauwens, 2005) – which of course may not be practical for any organisation. They are not – there are structures and hierarchies, the only difference is that these are flexible and non-obligatory, and are ‘based on merit used to enable participation’ (Bauwens, 2005). This opens up new avenues for community engagement, without the traditional impositions of the institution (which can cause barriers).

Together with the affordable infrastructure (enabling distributed access to resources) that comes with P2P processes, the recursive effects of culture are exponetially quickened and expanded. The social networks existing within various cultures, whether they are institutional, communal, or global, when amplified by the infrastructure and processes of P2P, enable broader, faster, and lower cost coordination of activities. Meanings, like collective knowledge, are emergent in the P2P model – which is effectively integrated in the recursive cultural effect of cultural institutions (see figure above).

Cultural institutions, small and large; local or state, national or international are, par excellence, curators of knowledge and resources that ‘bind space and time†for their societies, and share the knowledge that equals power for citizens of a democracy.

Communication technologies have always been essential to their role, but the peer to peer model offer attractive capabilities. There are of course other effects of P2P; but this post has been focused on the implication of the P2P model in the recursive cultural effect of cultural institutions.

References

Bauwens, M. (2005). The Political Economy of Peer Production. In A. Kroker & M. Kroker (Eds.), 1000 Days of Theory. Available online: www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499

Giddens, A. (1982). Profiles and critiques in social theory. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s Consequences. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications Inc.

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Before the first introduction of the mobile phone, people had little notions about how they would use it. The institutional and technical properties of the gadget were the primary foci of design for designers and developers. Yet with increasing usage, people became familiar with its technicalities and found new difficulties. Such difficulties translated into requirements for redesign. New mobile phones then had to include dialogues from people. Such processes of design must call on the human actions shaping the eventual structure of information systems. Many information systems researchers argue for the case of iterative design as a way to factor in the effects of human actions.

Reflexive design is about the inclusion of voices, facilitating freedom, and is entrenched in the philosophy behind the creation of the commons. It is more than a mere case of cooperation, and while there is an eventual goal, outcomes are emergent and continually evolving.

Here are two contemporary examples of how reflexive design can be put into practice:

Exhibit Commons is an interactive science museum that allows people to add meanings to existing collections using audio and video files, images, physical objects, etc. Collections that arise out of this project are mutable and multifaceted.

The Eclectic Tech Carnival (ETC)’s site reads: “A carnival of exchanging computer-related skills, ideas and art. By women and for women”. The ways they achieve this goal are varied, and more importantly, it offers a safe place for women to come together. They are free to express themselves and to learn from one another. Having participants as designers is a critical catalyst for inclusion.

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I think the other aspect of bounded rationality, and the more important one to know with regards to the commons, points out that most people are only partly rational, and are in fact emotional or irrational in most of their actions (a point put forward by Herbert Simon, in Models of My life, 1991).

The problem with most economic theories lies in their vein of rigid optimisation. From my last post, the problem that I have with Hardin’s ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ (1968) is the assumption of rationality. Again, it is interesting that supporters of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ support it with the claim that resources are finite; yet they assume the infinite rationality of human actions.

Conlisk (1996) summarised a number of empirical evidence justifying why bounded rationality works as a feasible theory. For example, studies have found that:

[People] display intransitivity; misunderstand statistical independence; mistake random data for patterned data and vice versa; fail to appreciate law of large number effects; fail to recognize statistical dominance; make errors in updating probabilities on the basis of new information; understate the significance of given sample sizes; fail to understand covariation for even the simplest 2X2 contingency tables; make false inferences about causality; ignore relevant information; use irrelevant information (as in sunk cost fallacies); exaggerate the importance of vivid over pallid evidence; exaggerate the importance of fallible predictors; exaggerate the ex ante probability of a random event which has already occurred; display overconfidence in judgment relative to evidence; exaggerate confirming over disconfirming evidence relative to initial beliefs; give answers that are highly sensitive to logically irrelevant changes in questions; do redundant and ambiguous tests to confirm an hypothesis at the expense of decisive tests to disconfirm; make frequent errors in deductive reasoning tasks such as syllogisms; place higher value on an opportunity if an experimenter rigs it to be the “status quo” opportunity; fail to discount the future consistently; fail to adjust repeated choices to accommodate intertemporal connections; and more.

In such experiments, the mental tasks put to people are often simple, at least relative to many economic decisions; whereas their responses are frequently way off. Most important, reasoning errors are typically systematic.

(Conlisk, 1996)

Let me clarify that this is not to mean that economic theories are not important. They are; but all good economists would also ask that we consider all costs in economic modelling. Some studies in economics have already incorporated the theory in recent years, such as deliberation costs as part of economic modelling.

What bounded rationality theory also raise is the dissatisfaction with the tragedy of the commons as one explanation of resource problems. It seems to suggest that the idea of having common pool resources is not feasible, or is doomed to fail. Yet history and stories have proven otherwise. Peer-to-peer networks, and other self-governing groups have proven themselves to be sustainable, and increased in value over time and space. The assumption of perfect rationality (a key argument of Hardin’s commons-tragedy) suggests that people cannot cooperate other than for their self interests – and therefore cooperative and collaborative will not last. A rather simplistic view I must say, simply because people do not live alone; they do not live without communities. What may appear to be selfish decisions of man are influenced by larger considerations of the communities they live in.

“We know of no people without names, no languages or cultures in which some manner of distinctions between self and other, we and they, are not made… Self-knowledge – always a construction no matter how much it feels like a discovery – is never altogether separable from claims to be known in specific ways by others.” (Calhoun c.f. Castells, 2003)

References

Castells, M. (2003). The Power of Identity. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.

Conlisk, J. (1996). Why Bounded Rationality? Journal of Economic Literature, 34(June), 669-700.

Simon, H. (1991). Models of My Life. London: Basic Books.

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