Emlyn's Digital Culture

My digital ethnography hit a bit of a stumbling block this week, with the forums and social media spaces going dark for an extended period of time. This made data collection extremely difficult and always veered away from my focal area of my ethnographic study.

In researching ways in which I could redirect my study I stumbled across something known as the 1% Rule of internet culture. This particular rule states that in most online communities only about 1% percent of the community are contributors or creators of content within the community. The rest of the 99% would be consumers of the content or lurkers within the community.

In the article by  Holly Goodier for BBC online she challenged the notion that this rule still applies in the present day. Is it still that 1% that are creating content for the masses? I applied this rule of thumb to my MOOC of choice and found that it is not necessarily true that only 1% of the community create content (in this case it is in the form of initial thread posts) on a regular basis. In truth it is a little more than 10% who are creating thread content or adding in items for discussion. This number however is outweighed by the number of views a particular forum receives. Fig 1 shows the number of posts (black box) to views (red box) ratio in the first week of the course.

Fig 1. A look at the activity on the forums in week one of the course

By the second week we see similar activity in terms of the number of posts but there seems to be even lower activity on the side of the views.

Fig 2. A look at the activity on the forums in week two of the course

The third and start of the fourth weeks also saw similar statistics coming through. I have found that many of the participants were looking to connect with each other on other social media sites as well as creating social groups centered around participants living in similar geographical areas or similar backgrounds. LinkedIn seemed to be the platform of choice for participants to connect with each other outside of the MOOC (Fig 3).

Fig  3. Participants trying to look for other places to connect with each other.

Unfortunately I am not able to gain any access to this particular group but this is just one of many groups starting to form from outside of the MOOC.

The idea of the 1% rule of internet culture has also made me self-reflect on my experiences online and with communities I engage in. Unfortunately I appear to be within that 99% of people who lurk in the background. Wait a second…..does this blog mean that I am creating new content? A question to ponder.