American Idol - what up?

So, this modest blog got a link from Helen A.S. Popkin's MSNBC story about American Idol and Sanjaya the other day.

Just to get full disclosure out of the way . . .

1. I know Helen outside of the Internet. She knew about what was in my blog already because we talk about Internet stuff.
   
2. American Idol makes me throw up in my own throat.
3. I don't really mind if you like or hate AI, that's not what this blog is about.
   

I could care less about the travesty that Howard Stern or Time's Person(s?) of the Year is wreaking on the popular show except that it illustrates some interesting trends in virtual communities.

So, in the unlikely event that you click over to this blog and read this post before commenting on Sanjaya, please follow these points of courtesy:

1. don't shout - no one likes shrill posts in ALL CAPS
2. challenge yourself to argue your point, not just state it - One poster for instance, tells us that "If you vote for Sanjaya, you are asking for everyone to boycott the next American Idol". Yeah? So? Is that important or bad? If so, why?
   

Sanjaya and the 1 percent

Building on an earlier post about "it's the user dummy", I'd like to point out what the ongoing journey of Sanjaya Malakar reveals about virtual communities.

Sanjaya is a fellow with hair and singing of equally dubious quality, and yet he persists on American Idol, prompting much hand-wringing from various quarters. This thanks (perhaps debatably) to the efforts of Howard Stern and his listeners.

What's interesting is that virtual communities can have big effects on the non-virtual world. That's not new, but this example highlights an interesting reason:

Virtual communities have no carrying-capacity for lurkers.

That is, while a community can have only so many active participants before it starts to schism or subdivide, there's no upper limit for the number of people who lurk. So, if these lurkers feel sufficiently like part of the community, their actions in service of a project dreamt up by more active members can have a huge impact.

Now, my argument relies on Stern's listeners being a virtual community, but I'll venture that that's not such a stretch. A lot of Howard Stern's success, I think, stems from how well he encourages audience members to think of themselves as part of his community. He talks to them well, occasionally plucks listeners from obscurity to feature them in ongoing roles, and generally does a better job of creating community around his show than other radio jockeys. I'd be interested to hear your takes on this in the comments.

So what's the takeaway? Well, a lot of the press about the 1% rule (not much of your community produces content), whether staid or er . . . not, focuses on the content producers, not the hidden power of the lurkers. I feel we need to take the lurkers more seriously. They may not be writing online novels or learned articles on the (amazing) cuttlefish, but perhaps they have better things to do than spend all afternoon blogging (for instance). They're still affecting the world around them; treat them with an according respect.