document: Invisible participants : how cultural capital relates to lurking behavior The asymmetry of activity in virtual communities is of great interest . While participation in the activities of virtual communities is crucial for a community 's survival and development , many people prefer lurking , that is passive attention over active participation . Lurking can be measured and perhaps affected by both dispositional and situational variables . This work investigates the concept of cultural capital as situational antecedent of lurking and de-lurking ( the decision to start posting after a certain amount of lurking time ) . Cultural capital is defined as the knowledge that enables an individual to interpret various cultural codes . The main hypothesis states that a user 's cultural capital affects her level of activity in a community and her decision to de-lurk and cease to exist in very active communities because of information overload . This hypothesis is analyzed by mathematically defining a social communication network ( SCN ) of activities in authenticated discussion forums . We validate this model by examining the SCN using data collected in a sample of 636 online forums in Open University in Israel and 2 work based communities from IBM . The hypotheses verified here make it clear that fostering receptive participation may be as important and constructive as encouraging active contributions in online communities .
doc_bio_tags: O O O O B I O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O