Looking at the different theories and concepts of participation in online communities there are three main behaviors that I feel best encompass my personal social media activity. Those behaviors are lurking, engagement, and publishing. However, even though I refer to my personal activity as being in line with these behaviors, I must first put forth my opinions on each of these behaviors and how they are not necessarily confined to a one behavior one person relationship as well as how they can combine with other behaviors to create an end result that is greater than each separate part.

First, we have lurking. This type of participation is generally defined as one-off viewing of content. It connotes a lack of engagement with the rest of the community members and it is passive and invisible to those who are not the actual participant. A lot of the time lurking is seen as a behavior attributed solely to the “outsiders” of a community. This is where I begin to disagree. Lurking is content consumption at its finest. You observe something, read it, and then ingest it for later use. Whatever information or content that was “lurked” now becomes part of your accumulated knowledge. This is how people learn, right?I have taken part in my fair share of lurking across a variety of different online communities, but I did not set out to be the “unnoticed” one in all of this. No, I was lurking to expand my knowledge limits; to learn more about something I previously was not comfortable conversing about without looking like a fool. I may not have engaged at that time or made myself visible, but once I feel informed enough to have an educated opinion I use the knowledge gained from lurking to better engage with the content and community members of where I previously only observed.
What exactly is considered engagement in an online community? Where is the line drawn between lurking and engagement? Is liking a photo on Facebook engagement? Yes, it is. Engagement is any behavior or action that you take that is visible to other community members, even if it is just one. Engagement is providing feedback, asking question and/or posting questions. It is an active and reactive behavior, which means when someone else takes an action you then engage with them by actively reacting to their post with anything from a like; to aneducated response in paragraph form. This brings me to my point about engagement. Where do you think all of the members who are so knowledgeable about topics got their info from? Well, some of it is actual real world experience, but a lot more learned what they know from lurking!

Lastly, we have publishing. Now, there is no “one” type of personality that fits publishers, but they are behaving in a distinctly separate way than the other two groups. Publishing is defined as authoring or remixing material. It is active and proactive, and it is the most visible of the three. Lurking and engagement are mainly concerned with non-market interests, but a large chunk of publishers are acting on strictly market interests.What that means is that publishers are responding to a demand from a market, so their work hinges on a supply and demand based relationship.