Lurker
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In Internet culture, a lurker is a person who reads discussions on a message board, newsgroup, chatroom, file sharing or other interactive system, but rarely participates.
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[edit] History
The term dates back to the mid-1980s,
Because BBSs were often accessed by a single phone line (frequently in someone's home), there was an expectation that all who used a bulletin board would contribute to its content by uploading files and posting comments. Lurkers were viewed negatively, and might be barred from access by the sysop, if they did not contribute anything but kept the phone line tied up for extended periods.
Many Internet communities advise newbies to lurk for some time to get a feel for the specific culture and etiquette of the community, lest they make an inappropriate or redundant comment, ask a Frequently Asked Question, or incite a flame war. This leads to the tongue-in-cheek command to "lurk more". The verb to "de-lurk" means to start contributing actively to a community having been a lurker previously.
There are also some who lurk on a forum habitually, and rarely, if ever, contribute. It is generally difficult to guess how many such lurkers are present, due to their silence. In flame-wars, a participant who is losing an argument will sometimes claim to receive email support from lurkers. This inspired Jo Walton to write a filk on the subject entitled "The Lurkers Support Me in Email" [1].
[edit] In popular culture
| Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines. The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones. |
- J. Michael Straczynski, the writer of the television science fiction series Babylon 5, decided to use the term "lurkers" to refer to the homeless space station inhabitants of Brown Sector because of their similarity to Internet lurkers.
- There is an email archiving tool (http://lurker.sourceforge.net) of the same name.
- A singer/songwriter project from Germany named itself "200 Lurkers".
- The circle of filmmakers starting in 1996 (and then the general film festival attendees) of the annual H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival call themselves "the Lurkers". Also the film festival program is called the Daily Lurker (after H. P. Lovecraft's The Lurker at the Threshold). The festival is run by Lurker Films.
- Andrew Migliore and John Strysik wrote a book called Lurker in the Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H. P. Lovecraft.
- In Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, developed by Blue Sky Productions and published by Origin Systems in 1992, the octopuses living in the sewers were called lurkers. If you attacked one, and it became hostile, the game informed you that "You see a hostile lurker."
- In the Jak and daxter series lurkers are a race of creatures distinguisable by large lighter colored lower lips with four teeth like extentions on them
[edit] Trivia
| Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines. The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones. |
- In Japanese, a lurker is referred to by the wasei-eigo term "read-only member" (リードオンリーメンバー rīdoonrīmembā), possibly as a pun on "read-only memory". Likewise, a leech is called a "download-only member."
[edit] See also
- Babylon 5's use of the Internet
- Will Heisey
[edit] Further reading
- Blair Nonnecke and Jenny Preece (2003). "Silent participants: Getting to know lurkers better", in D. Fisher and Christopher Lueg: From Usenet to Co Webs: Interacting with social information spaces. Springer, 110–132. ISBN 1852335327.
[edit] External links
- Participation Inequality: Lurkers vs. Contributors in Internet Communities - Article with several examples of the large percentage of users who lurk and guidelines for encouraging more participation.
- Lurkerking Tongue in cheek project tracking lurkers of various forums.
- Lurker is also the name of a Free mail archiving software.da:Lurker
de:Lurker es:Lurker fr:Lurker it:Lurker nl:Lurker ja:リードオンリーメンバー
