Re: Silent participation

Kevin Leander (kevin.leander who-is-at vanderbilt.edu)
Fri, 10 Sep 1999 08:28:20 -0600

I doubt we understand silence very well, on the list or otherwise, or even
name it very well. If we could look around the "room" of participants, and
back through history, I'm sure we'd have plenty of material to make a case
for silencing and a lack of trust at it's more commonly conceived. But at
the same time, there's an incredible wide variety of activity indexed in
what might look like more peripheral or non-participation, including
endless side dialogues, "backchannel" talk, ironic use of the list,
appropriating ideas into papers, self-arguments with list participants,
coffee chats with other "silent" participants, semi-coded messages to known
readers who never post, discussions at conferences among otherwise "silent"
participants, etc.

I would guess, if studied in some kind of formal way, that list
participants across this wide variety of practice and meaning would be
equally puzzled by others' use of the list.

In Communities of Practice, Wenger (1998) has some interesting ideas on
"non-participation" (pp. 169-172) but I would imagine, and particularly for
the distribution of an online community, that the apparent "non" is only an
opening to understanding a multitude of forms.

Kevin