Lurking – Talking Tuition
This week in #Univ349DC we are examining another aspect of digital citizenship – lurking. The word and action of lurking have been associated negatively since they came into use, but lurking can be an effective way to find and filter knowledge without becoming caught up in the politics of it all. Participatory culture online encourages commenting and sharing as ideal activities for contributing to a community, but lurking has its place as well. If you leave a comment on an interesting article hoping to engage with the source and find yourself in a heated debate with other commentors, I feel that can take away from the original goal. In this way, lurking helps participants to absorb information and process it on their own for further participation at a later time.
As the picture above indicates, I am continuing my research into college tuition costs. Lurking has given me some insight and new information in ways that I found surprising and gratifying. The 2 sites that I used for this investigation were Facebook and Twitter. I experienced some carry-over information from previous research in the forms of the Dr. Pepper Tuition Giveaway and news of Germany granting free tuition to Americans. I spent time in between classes and studying lurking on these sites and found that much of the talk was the same. With updates every second, it becomes easy to see what the big topic of the moment is. This week, for college tuition, those topics are the Affordable College Textbook Act and a new documentary, The Big Game: College Football Stealing Your Education, that proposes that college athletic programs are to blame for rising tuition costs.I did experience some frustration and most likely, missing critical information when I had trouble getting the “Top” posts feed to load on Facebook and hope to find a solution to this for next week’s post.
I found that the active participants in this topic are constantly paying attention to new sources and educating commentors on their views in the hopes of creating shared knowledge. This is participation that happens on a daily basis and these participants are constantly keeping their collaborators and allies updated by sharing links and tagging. This is a stark contrast to the daily users like myself before this class that stumble across an article, possibly add their two cents, and never seek to reengage afterwards.
If I had not been lurking on this topic, who knows how long it would have taken for this information to cross my radar? Our social media networks are limited when we rely on our friends or those we follow to find the information and share it with us. Though lurking in itself is considered to be inactive participation, I find it to be an active pursuit of information. We lurk on exes, crushes, and colleagues, so why not lurk on the world as a whole in an effort to be more well-informed? I certainly will be doing so more often regarding my own personal interests and scholarly pursuits from now on.
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