Motivations for Participation

Trebor Scholz
Department of Media Study
trebor@thing.net

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0

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What motivates people to engage on the Social Web?

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 Some Americans giving up friends, sex for internet: survey

One in five Americans say

they're having less sex to
spend more time on the
internet, text messaging
and similar technologies, a
new survey suggests.
Even higher ratios of U.S.
adults are choosing digital
technology over television
and friends, while the
majority say they could not
go a week without being
connected to the internet,
according to the survey
released Wednesday.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/09/20/tech-internet-activities.html

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 Yossi Vardi, one of the original founders of ICQ, the first instant
messaging service, posits four factors that inspire folks to
participate:

self expression

communication

sharing

collaboration

http://newassignment.net/blog/kelly_nuxoll/dec2006/15/what_motivates_p
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 Typologies of Participation

Questions:
Which different types (and intensities) of participation
can you identify?

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http://oedb.org/blogs/ilibrarian/wp-content/sns_activities.jpg

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Activities

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 read (92.4%)
browse -- photos (82.1%)
watch -- video (74.5%)
comment (67.7%)
friend (59.7%)
share (58.6%)
write -- blog entries (58.2%)
subscribe (56.3%)
bookmark (47.5%)
link (46.8%)
tag (46.0%)
07
z 20

listen -- music (45.3%)

l
Scho

collaborate (40.3%)
ebor

forward (33.1%)
y Tr

favorite (25.9%) In the survey users

e
Surv

poke (25.5%) described their most

moderate (13.7%) frequent activities
remix (9.5%) on the Social Web

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Participation

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 Participation on the Social Web
archiving memory

transparency of rules identification

and power dynamics
individual vs. network value
format of contributions
tone, passion, humor, personality

low threshold engagement trust

time scale
type of content
relaxation
“I give because I am
group belonging social capital great” (agonistic giving)
job
emotional support
sharing the experience ` contributing to
access to information
of one’s time & place the greater good
software architecture
feedback
intellectual property mobile computing
pleasure of creation
translation reciprocity
hormones

friendship challenge

embodied and networked sociality signal-to-noise ratio

gender
permanency and
privacy of content
Trebor Scholz 2007

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People group around social objects such as photos or videos,
or, around topics/interests like cars, mental health, technology
(e.g., coding), self-help, business, gaming, creating avatars,
activist interests or politics in general, parenting, faith,
feminism, owning pets, sports (soccer, hockey). Other sites
focus on dating services, career-oriented social networking, or
"life sharing." Social sites tap into the most particular desires.

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Survey

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Survey
In order to find analyze current trends with more authority,
the author conducted a survey and 297 people responded
(80.8% finishing rate). This is a large enough number of
respondents to speak to trends in participatory behavior. 56.3%
(143) of respondents were male and 42.55 female 42.5% (108).
1.2 % (3) stated their gender as "other." The largest number of
contributors to this survey was 29 years old (16 users) but all
ages from 15- over 60 years old were represented.

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Other motivations, which were added by people who took the survey:
"It enables one to live internationally and still maintain a sense of friendship,
when there aren't many people you know in your new country."

"collaboration with co-workers"

"It makes watching TV less boring"

"With a little luck I can trace friends I had lost contact with."

"It helped me find places to stay while traveling"

"It's also an escape from stress or to avoid doing work."

"Promote shows and get in touch with old friends from school or work."

"They keep me in touch with the 'movers and shakers' in topics that interest
me - social / work use of mobile technologies, mobile working and global
workplace trends. Social platforms keep me in touch with young members of
my family in Scotland (nieces in their early 20s; I am cool old auntie, Scottish
and live in England)."

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"Participants in peer production communities have many
different motivations for jumping in, from fun and altruism
to achieving something that is of direct value to them.
Though egalitarianism is the general rule, most peer networks
have an underlying structure, where some people have more
authority and influence than others. But the basic rules of
operation are about as different from corporate command-
and-control hierarchy as the latter was from the feudal crafts
shop of the pre-industrial economy."

Wikinomics, p25

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Participants added activities like informing others, organizing,
researching, chatting, debating, creating art, and developing
community.

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It is significant that remixing was listed as least frequent
activity on the Social Web. First, remixing requires a certain
degree of skill in the use of social tools, and second, the
importance of the remix may simply be overestimated due to
the centrality of the creative commons debates led by
Lawrence Lessig and many others. It is possible, but not
substantiated by this study, that most artists create their work
alone with the use of the remix.

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Survey: Reasons for participation

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 access to information
possibility to find entertainment

have fun with the content of others

hang out with friends
archive memories (videos, photos, texts)
relaxation
finding new friends
group belonging

Most participants in the survey said that establishing a reputation, finding

emotional support, getting dates, and getting jobs, and experimenting with
identity were not important to them in their use of the Social Web.

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Will people will visit more often if they see photos of their peers?

Kapoor, Nishikant, Joseph Konstan, & Loren Terveen.

(2005). How Peer Photos Influence Member
Participation in Online Communities. Proceedings of
ACM CHI 2005, April 2–7, 2005, Portland, Oregon, USA.
http://www.grouplens.org/papers/pdf/lbr-590-kapoor.pdf

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Other reasons for participation included:

"The number of my (real-world) friends who are using them."

"The quality of the content, comments, video etc.

(knowledgeable, first-hand experience especially)"

“Ease of navigation"

"The amount I am allowed to create myself and keep as mine.

The amount of cooperation found on the site. The real life talk
about the site and number of real life local people in my real life
social sphere using the site, affects the degree to which I use it."

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"Openness, honesty, integrity, communication, good (customer)
service if applicable"

"The amount of control I have over my own content, my ability

(along with the ability of others) to shape either the content or
structure of the site, and the amount of privacy/protection from
corporate and governmental agents."

"Ease of use, lack of abusive users, bandwidth"

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"Number of users the site admin's must be responsive to user
needs and directives."

"1.) Importing and exporting my stuff to and from other services.

In other words, the ease with which this service allows me to
switch to another service, but ALSO the ease with which it allows
me to import my data from other services.
2.) Ease of locating my contacts from other networks in this
service (importing contacts)."

"How it lets a busy yet lazy person track her friends without
needing to do anything."

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"I really use the sites as a way to keep up with others and as a
result of peer pressure. i tend to provide false information for the
login and keep much of the rest impersonal."

"A cost/benefit analysis of their social utility - what i gain from

participation versus what i lose. anonymity is often lost, public/
private is breached, my demographic data becomes available to
benefit corporations, marketers, and the government. Sometimes
I participate because of a social imperative - i am excluded from
a conversation if I don't participate. so I gain access to a
community and a conversation, and thus social standing or
power to affect a conversation or community. and i gain cultural
and technological literacy. in my case, i also gain business
standing"

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When using a site, respondents cared most of all about the
amount of spam that they receive, followed the quality of the
user interface and the topical orientation of the site and the
transparency of the ownership and privacy rules of the site. Also
the tone, passion, and personality of the posts on the site
mattered tremendously.

Users cared "somewhat" about the ability to share videos and

photos with others and the values (or ethics) of the company
who offers the service, the number of ads on the site and the
ease with which this service allows them to switch to another
service. Most respondents in this survey did not care about the
social class or gender of others on a given social site.

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Motivations

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Social Voyerism

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-Emotional support
(The Social Web sites allows people to connect quickly and
easily. Instant Messaging applications like Skype, which of
course also functions as voiceover IP telephony, are free
and allow for disembodied emotional support and "life
sharing." Many self-help forums attest to this fact.

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Being where many other people are.

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 "Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with
people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you
wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space
conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends
are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom,
their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry,
what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re
having drinks with tonight."

http://www.disambiguity.com/ambient-intimacy
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Care

“There are people, some close friends, some not so

close, that I (for whatever reason) think of as family in
the sense that I care about their well-being and want
them to be happy and successful. If I think they are
benefiting from something I do, like tagging, then I
will damn well take the trouble.”

http://tinyurl.com/3yth34

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Student responses
Join because it’s popular, spark one’s creativity (post art), find like-
minded people, deepen relationship with somebody whom you met
f2f, indirect ways of communicating, promote music and create fan
community, innocent spying (on your long-distance boyfriend),
identity-representation, publicize existing relationships, public
display of connection, find out stuff about people before meeting
them, social stigma attached to not having a site, sampling music
before buying it, organize people, fantasy sports (FB fantasy hockey),
staying in touch with family (surveillance on kids), being
entertained, escape the real world as you used to in cinema,
mentally and emotionally soothing (addictive), self-realization
through self-expression (there are other geeks like you), it becomes a
routine/ a ritual, showing off (being annoying as asset), show off
your personality, narcissism, archiving and distributing artwork,
promoting business-- finding work (FB marketplace), helps with life-
transitions(high school to college)

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People spend time trying to impress their peers
with their profile, their site design, etc

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-Hormones
(Finding dates, managing to impress the
right person is made easier through social
networking sites such as Facebook,
Myspace but also ).

-Privacy of content
The survey that follows this passage,
outlines how crucial privacy is for users of
the Social Web. They are especially
concerned about the use of the large
amount data that they provide
corporations that own social platforms.

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/larrythebiker/212325747/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/socw324/479224536/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9282530@N04/864702909/

Motivations for Migrants

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-Content
(are people interested in the topics that are brought up)

-Social capital/increased recognition

(this is a critical motivation for students on Facebook,
for example)

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The Promise of Free Service

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-Access to information
(i.e., access to knowledge is complex and takes on various
forms-- from encyclopedic information to code, recipes, and
health information)

One of the prime motivations for online participation is

access to knowledge. From collaborative research to the
collection of web references and citations on scholarly
mailing lists to technological forums, the enhancement of
knowledge is a crucial reason for participation in
the Social Web.

http://tinyurl.com/2ffx4l

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-Memory
(Memory relates to permanence. Photo and video sharing
sites allowing users to "outsource" their memories to the
World Wide Web.)

-Relaxation/entertainment
(e.g. sites like Joost.tv but also last.fm makes the way people
access television and music more social)

-Time
(How long it takes from entering of the URL to "participation-
readiness" determines how many people will contribute. This
threshold became increasingly lower over the past years.)

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 -Instrumental aid
(finding job)
People’s daily
interaction is
increasingly
facilitated through
techno-social channels.
Sociable web media
allow individuals to
develop oceans of
http://tinyurl.com/23emb5 “weak ties.”
Such high level of low intensity connectivity characterizes the
contemporary managerial personality. “Weak ties” are essential
for independent “creatives” whose livelihood depends on such
extensive yet loose social networks.
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-Permanence
Permanence of content availability keeps people from contributing
because they do not want a particular message that they sent to a
bulletin board to still be available online 20 years later. On the other
hand, the longevity of mailing list archives, for example, is important
as they document conversational research. Lasting access to list essays
and posts is therefore an enticing factor for those who seek platforms
that offer continuous availability.
The permanence of a medium has important privacy implications.
Upon delivery, an ephemeral message is gone, except in the
participants’ memory. It cannot be subsequently conveyed to others
except by creating a new message telling about it. A persistent
message, however, can be conveyed to others who were not privy to the
original conversation.

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-Reciprocity (peer-to-peer networks)
In "The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods
in Cyberspace" Peter Kollock writes:

"A person is motivated to contribute valuable information to the

group in the expectation that one will receive useful help and
information in return. Indeed, there is evidence that active
participants in online communities get more responses faster to
questions than unknown participants (Kollock 178)."

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-Distributed credibility & trust
(Many people prefer to remain anonymous online out of
privacy concerns. The more personal data are requested from
a site, the more users may be inclined not to contribute. An
overarching identity that would allow users to only fill out one
profile and then retain a steady identity across sites is the goal
of projects like OpenID.)

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-gender

-scale

-feedback

-philosophy of website

http://tinyurl.com/yv8uwj
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Becoming a Speaker

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-Sense of belonging to a group
People, in general, are fairly social beings and it is motivating to
many people to receive direct responses to their contributions. Most
online communities enable this by allowing people to reply back to
contributions (i.e. many Blogs allow comments from readers, one can
reply back to forum posts, etc).

People, in general, are fairly social beings and it is motivating to

many people to receive direct responses to their contributions. Most
online communities enable this by allowing people to reply back to
contributions (i.e. many Blogs allow comments from readers, one can
reply back to forum posts, etc).

People build self-esteem through contributions and to garner

recognition for contributing; and to develop new skills and
opportunities for ego building and self-
actualization.

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re-insertion of historical figures
as friends (Cage, Derrida)

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-Sharing the experiences of one's time and place

Like Banefield, New York University professor Russel Hardin brings up also the example
of participation in demonstrations. He describes them as being driven by the desire to be part of
history; propelled by the desire “to share the experiences of [one's] time and place.” Harding fo-
cuses on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, at a time when people took to the streets to
participate in a social movement that they believed in. They participated for moral reasons but
also because the civil rights movement was a hugely formative series of events that they wanted
to be a part of. While these examples refer to embodied participation, disembodied contribution
may also be driven, by the intensity of the engagement. In his Collective Action Russell Hardin
writes:

That we are social creatures is not only a philosophical thesis; it is also a commonsense
realization. We become more than we are by reading Shakespeare and the Greeks, by
listening to Bach, Beethoven, and Bartok-- and by participating in certain events and
movements, for example, by going to war or refusing to go to war. Whether it is called
moral or self-interested, the urge to participate is a fundamental motivation. The joy of
experiencing oneself as a creator spurs self-confidence and leads to more participation.
Once a participant decides to contribute, what might be an appropriate format of contribution?
The format of contribution to a mailing list, for example, determines if others will follow
and engage themselves. Writing for the Web calls for the presented information to be concise
and broken up into short paragraphs.

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 -Format, rhythm, length, tone style, passion, humor,
personality of contributions, pleasure of content
creation/
This kind of writing is distinctly different from writing for print. In this context it is also
important to mention mobile computing devices. It is still difficult to read or write lengthy en-
tries on mobile devices because screens are too small, and the low bandwidth on these devices
makes meaningful contributions complicated.

Apart from urgency, also the format of posts (e.g. length) plays a role. Very lengthy texts
posted on a mailing list may discourage some people from contributing. Judith Donath in her
definition of sociable media writes:

The speed at which a medium can convey a message affects the type of information that
is exchanged and the communication style. As communication frequency increases, mes-
sages become more informal and intimate. This is true even within the same medium –
rapidly exchanged papers notes are more informal than a letter with weeks of travel to its
destination.

Before contributing to a forum, many people consider if their contribution will remain
relatively private (i.e. only read by subscribers to a particular mailing list) or if it will be a per-
manent, archived record in a publicly accessible archive. These factors related to permanency
and privacy also need to be considered.

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 -Format, rhythm, length, tone style, passion, humor,
personality of contributions, pleasure of content
creation

Technological formats like chat rooms and Instant Messaging

motivate completely different writing styles because of the
frequency and instantaneity of such synchronous sociable media.
An engaging, conversational, and revealing writing style with a
sense of humor, and intimate tone that shows a humble,
passionate author is central when it comes to writing for the
Web. It is obvious also that there needs to be an urgency to the
topic of discussion. (After the events of September 11, 2001 more
than 35% of Americans who were part of online communities
posted to them, for example.)

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-Possibility of mobile participation
(The ease of use also includes the
ability to upload to websites from
mobile phone cameras. This is
made increasingly easier by social
media giants like Myspace and
Facebook).

http://tinyurl.com/3atqky

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Tradeoff

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Pleasure of creation Intrusion into the personal

They gain friendships Market research

Share their life experience
Archive their memories
They are getting jobs
Find dates and contribute to
the greater good
Social enjoyment
Maximum convenience
Ads, unwanted content
Commodification of intimacy (dating sites)
Spam
Breach of social contract
Society of control
Amazon.com helps people to find books and music
but may erode valuable processes by which people
discover new authors or artists. Constraints and
accidents of everyday life are the basis for enjoyable
and meaningful activities, even if they are less
efficient.

"The debate keeps getting framed as if the only true alternative were to opt out of
media altogether and live in the woods, eating acorns and lizards and reading
only books published on recycled paper by small alternative presses"
(Jenkins, p 248-9).

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 - end -

please direct comments, additions, etc

to trebor@thing.net

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