Lurking in Museums: In Support of Passive Participation

Lurking in Museums: In Support of Passive Participation
Smith Bautista, Susana , University of Southern California, susanesm@usc.edu
Lurking is a term that has gained popularity with the advent of online communities. Museums are no exception to this renewed interest in community building, both online and onsite. The Internet has helped museums to better serve their communities, connecting physical events and exhibitions with online services, information, and activities. The greater museum community is compartmentalized into different groups, including educators, scholars, teenagers, families and more, but their dues-paying members are perhaps the closest to what is more commonly known as affinity spaces (James Gee) or knowledge-sharing communities of practice (CoP). Many of the membership groups organize events at the museum, raise funds for the museum, socialize regularly, and even have online profiles, blogs, or pages on social media sites. The term lurking has arisen because online communities have high expectations for their members to participate and contribute, in particular with online games and chat forums. The web usability expert Jakob Nielsen (2006) proposed the well-known 90-9-1 rule of user participation in online communities, which states that 90% of users are lurkers, 9% of users contribute from time to time, and 1% of users account for most contributions. The more passive acts of being present (virtually or physically), listening, watching, and reading – that is, lurking – are considered negative when contrasted to the more dynamic acts of writing, contributing information, performing tasks, or discourse that are all viewed as essential to the formation and maintenance of community. Even the spectatorial can be considered negatively, as in voyeurism that is often perceived as leading to perverse and criminal acts.

Analogous to the conventional concept of community is the idea of a social network as a system of individual nodes that are all related, first proposed by J. A. Barnes in the early 1950s. The concept of the network society has been best developed by Manuel Castells (2000, p. 12) who states that, “The ability of an actor in the network – be it a company, individual, government, or other organization – to participate in the network is determined by the degree to which the node can contribute to the goals of the network… This leads to a binary process of inclusion and exclusion from the network. The people at the bottom are those who, with nothing to offer the network, are excluded.” Similar to lurking but more related to economics is the free rider problem, as it can be argued that every community – regardless of its size or nature – offers a public good and is based upon some type of exchange system.

Art museums are spaces that have traditionally encouraged lurking, as visitors are invited to leisurely appreciate works of art in a reverent environment that prioritizes observation, contemplation, learning, and personal interpretation. There are some exceptions, however, such as with participatory art practices that gained prominence in the early 1960s and continue to be exhibited in museums today, dependent on visitors’ active participation for their realization. Museums have entered the digital age just as have other traditional socio-cultural institutions, and consequently they are incorporating new technologies for the purposes of facilitating exhibition, interpretation, education, and participation. The modern museum presumes that visitors – especially younger ones (digital natives) – expect a more interactive museum experience that allows them to actively participate and even share their opinions within a community that is becoming perceptibly less hierarchical and authoritarian. New technologies offer tremendous possibilities for all visitors to engage more deeply with art, but they can also distract from the passive acts of contemplation and observation if they demand too much physical interaction. Nevertheless, art museums remain a trusted and respected place in which to observe, think, feel, and learn. This paper will assert that lurking is a necessary and useful part of community engagement and learning in the digital age, and that art museums are a valuable and unique space for such activity. Some specific technologies used by art museums today will be discussed in the context of whether they promote a more active or passive experience. A critical distinction must also be made, however, between the terms interaction and participation, the latter of which is more open-ended than the former.

In writing about participatory culture and the digital age, many scholars such as Henry Jenkins and Mikuzo Ito discuss the importance of participation amongst youth while also stressing the importance of other skills, characteristics, and stages of learning that could easily be construed as lurking. We understand from Richard Bartle’s (1996) taxonomy, D.T. Schaller et al.’s (2007) four learning preferences, and Ito et al.’s (2008) three genres, that there are many ways to engage in activities, including both play and learning. The more active forms include creating, producing, sharing, contributing, playing, and commenting. These forms of participation are the most visible to the community and as such, are most prized in that they serve as an example for other members to emulate. More passive forms include listening, reading, watching, and browsing, as well as the introspective acts of thinking, reflecting, evaluating, and forming opinions. When these passive acts are shared with other individuals, discourse arises (physical or virtual), which can then be considered a more active and public form of participation. Different personalities also emerge within groups, and more active contributors will try to lead others less inclined to participate. Jenkins et al. (2008, p. 7) assert that, “In such a world [participatory culture], many will only dabble, some will dig deeper, and still others will master the skills that are most valued within the community.” This paper will show that all types of participation are essential to the development and maintenance of communities. The formation of knowledge and learning is a linear process that begins with more introspective and often individual acts, which in many instances then become public when thoughts, creations, and knowledge are shared with others. If thoughts are not shared and knowledge remains private, then the learning process merely continues with the individual.

The negative implications of lurking arise mostly from within the communities themselves. What cultural communities tend to forget, however, is that lurkers play an important role; they provide an audience, they carefully observe community norms and practices, and they contemplate and interpret that which they observe to perhaps share later with others. Performers do not want to perform without an audience, writers do not want to write books that nobody reads, and museums cannot open without visitors. Certainly, artists have a personal drive to create that does not require an audience or even a client, but even the most dedicated artist desires feedback, validation, or public acknowledgment. Physical spaces and organizations have long measured success in quantitative terms of the number of seats filled, visitors through the front door, or books or tickets sold. Online spaces are no different; the success of websites are most commonly measured by the number of clicks, page views, or downloads, rather than the more interactive number of comments, links, or uploads. As Web 2.0 features become more common on websites, these interactive metrics will surely begin to matter more. Still the number of people “passively” watching, reading, and listening are a strong measure of success, as well as a strong incentive for creators, organizations, and funders alike.

Museums need to protect the act of lurking. Any expectation of active participation, interaction, and sharing may inhibit lurkers from eventually participating, for lurkers need not be defined as having rigid characteristics but rather as representing merely one stage in the long process of learning and civic engagement. In its recent report Museums & Society 2034: Trends and Potential Futures, the American Association of Museums (2008, p. 19) states that, “While technological progress has brought much value to society, one byproduct of these emergent structural shifts in communication technologies is almost certainly going to be a world with fewer and fewer places where the public can find respite and retreat.” Through their expertly researched and curated exhibitions and related public programming, museums are best able to teach their visitors and members how to observe, how to critically think, and how to develop opinions in order to more effectively act on them if so desired. They can also teach the value of being an audience within a socially networked environment, which is the first step to recognizing the importance of community and public goods. This paper will discuss how museums might continue to encourage lurking in synergy with new digital technologies, and likewise how youth can become empowered to not only act, but also to observe and contemplate. As Jenkins et al. surmise (2008, p. 39), “…knowing how to act within the distributed knowledge system is more important than learning content. Because content is something that can be ‘held’ by technologies such as databases, websites, wikis, and so forth, the curricular focus is on learning how to generate, evaluate, interpret, and deploy data.” Those who lurk in museums (online or physically) are not evading their role; they do have a very important role within their community and within the process of acquiring, forming and sharing knowledge, and even more so in the participatory culture of the digital age.