Online Parasites: Concept, Characteristics, and Implications for Business Communication

We conducted preliminary interviews with seven participants to observe how they used the internet, why they joined online communities, and how they obtained information from the communities. Interviews were conducted from May 25, 2020 to July 7, 2020, and each interview took 25 minutes on average. We negotiated the location and time with each participant in advance and subsequently conducted a one-to-one interview at a cafe or quiet place near the participant’s school.

To facilitate the study analysis, the interview process was recorded with the participants’ consent, and the recording was taken using a smartphone. After the second interview, the contents of the interview were analyzed, and the third to seventh interviews were focused on information that required confirmation or elaboration. The transcription of the interview recording was taken by the researcher using software, followed by revision. The text of the interview after the transfer was 71 pages in total (A4 paper, 11-point, double line spacing).

Interview data were analyzed according to the grounded theory methodology (GTM), as presented by Strauss and Corbin (1990). Grounded theory is a systematic and flexible research method required to collect and analyze qualitative data to construct a data-based theory (Lee, 2015). Grounded theory is mainly used when the conceptual framework for a specific phenomenon is not clearly identified and a lack of understanding exists of the relationship between concepts, or when repeated research is not conducted on a specific problem (Park & Lee, 2017). Because this study was designed to delve into the understanding of online community usage behavior and business communication, as well as to explore a new user type, we judged it appropriate to use a grounded theory approach to analyze the collected qualitative data.

The questions used in the interview were based on the research goals. They revolved around the use of personal networks and were structured as open questions to accurately capture the participants’ experiences. Table 1 lists the interview questions. During the interview, we made adjustments according to the situation, such as the sequence of questions and the way the interviewees answered.

The semi-structured questionnaire used in this study was based on the paper by Takahashi et al. (2003). In addition, to ensure the validity of the questionnaire content, participants were shown the transcribed interview text and asked whether it reflected their thoughts correctly and appropriately. This negated the subjectivity of the researcher, ensuring that the results would not contain distortions.

Current college students have grown along with the development of the internet, which they are accustomed to and can use proficiently. In a study on social media by Williams, Crittenden, Keo, and McCarty (2012), 80% of the research participants were college students who considered themselves to be spectators rather than active users of social media.

In a cross-border environment, it is possible to capture the diversity in experiences across various situations and cultures, such as by using a Chinese SNS versus a community or Korean SNS. For example, significant differences exist in internet usage (including average daily usage time, usage purpose, etc.) between Chinese students in Korea and Chinese students in China. Furthermore, the psychological maladjustment of Chinese students in South Korea and compulsive behavior related to internet use, as well as the degree of internet poisoning, are relatively prominent (Zhang, Kim, & Jang, 2015). Therefore, in this study, Chinese students over 20 years old who were studying in South Korea were selected as interview participants.

In total, seven participants were selected for the interview. These included four men and three women, with a minimum age of 25 years and a maximum of 33 years, all of whom were graduate students majoring in electronic commerce (Table 2).

Information-seeking behavior is the purposive seeking of information to satisfy some goal (Wilson, 2000). While seeking, the individual may interact with manual information systems (such as a newspaper or library) or with computer-based systems (such as the World Wide Web). Several interviewees stated that they used an SNS to meet their information and cognitive needs.

By acquiring information from the internet or SNS, users can receive help and solve problems in all aspects of work, study, and daily life. For personal shopping, evaluation information on products based on other people’s reviews can also impact purchase propensity. The participants also conveyed that the use of an SNS to obtain information is mainly due to the timeliness of this information acquisition method, the accuracy of information, and the comprehensiveness of information that can be obtained.

At the level of interaction between users and the system, most interviewees expressed that they were unwilling to provide general contributions to the SNS community (in other words, to create content) due to the requirements of technical ability, time and energy, personality, and the SNS environment.

Is clicking a “like” button a contribution behavior? Lee, Hansen, and Lee (2016) studied the “like” behavior on Facebook and stated that enjoyment was the main motivation for sample users to click “like.” “Enjoyment” means that the user likes the content, agrees with it, and relates to it, and the content is posted by a person who is important to them. In addition, a monetary incentive (such as receiving coupons or a bargain deal) also positively impacts “like” click behavior. We received the following information from the interviews:

From this perspective, the main reasons for clicking “like” include reflecting one’s own attitude toward others or the content, passing time, maintaining contact with others, and obtaining monetary rewards.

Lurkers are generally defined as users who neither post nor contribute to the online community. Contributions include shared bookmarks and feeds, posts in forums, shared items in task lists, blog entries or comments, shared files, and new or revised Wiki pages (Muller, 2012). Never posting or commenting is interpreted as zero contribution (Wairimu & Andoh-Baidoo, 2018). In other words, users who neither publish content nor make the contributions detailed above can be called lurkers. However, Beike and Wirth-Beaumont (2005) define a lurker as an online community member who accesses and uses the online community but does not post messages. These users do not strengthen the community through reciprocal relationships in any form and have no direct social interaction with the community. Thus, the definition of lurkers is very vague from the perspective of user interactions with content.

Clearly, a user’s interactive behavior is primarily a reaction behavior stemming from the consideration of personal position. In other words, the individual will most likely not view it as a contribution. Perceived contribution refers to the user’s perception of the internet or the community, not the perspective of other members or the community.

However, from other perspectives, the user’s interaction with the community and content does contribute to the community. For example, ShareNcare is a Facebook-based social donation platform business that was established in 2015 to solve social problems through donations. On this website, the stories of people who need assistance are written and uploaded. If netizens click “like” or share the content after reading the story, the sponsoring company will donate instead of the netizens. Enterprises will also enjoy the publicity effect based on the spread of the story. In addition, the presence of many lurkers may increase the popularity of the community through their numbers, as they generate website traffic and increase clicks (Cullen & Morse, 2011). Alternatively, the lurkers leave evidence of having read the producer’s work, which can greatly inspire the producer (Edelmann, 2016).

Based on users’ interactive behavior and perceived community contributions, we newly defined online parasites as users who access an online community and interact (as by liking and favoriting) with the content but add no substantial content creation or contribution. Although lurkers do not interact with community content or other members, they regard the SNS use itself as a way of contributing to the SNS company. However, parasites focus more on obtaining useful information from the SNS for their own purposes, and they do not consider the impact of their own usage on the company.

Here, we interpret “online parasites” as users who actively obtain desired information from, but do not contribute to, the internet. Terminologically, a parasite is an organism that lives in a host organism and receives its food from or at the expense of its host (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/about.html). This aligns with the meaning of online parasites described in this manuscript. That is, the dependence between people’s information needs and the internet is like the symbiotic relationship between parasites and their hosts; users benefit from the internet, and its information fills their nutritional needs. Their primary purpose is not, as with general passive users, to monitor other people’s lives such as by browsing and viewing people’s profiles or the contents of posts on an SNS (Verduyn et al., 2015). That is because processing information without contributing can be a high-performance, easy, socially supported, and resource-saving way to improve work efficiency. Online parasites are often strategic while participating in online activities, and thus spend considerable searching until they obtain the information they need. In other words, to satisfy primary needs (such as increasing awareness, improving professional skills, or solving problems), they will flexibly utilize the information obtained in an “active lurker as practitioner” fashion (Bozkurt et al., 2020).

Due to time and recognition limitations, increased role conflicts or role overloads can prevent users in the online community from responding effectively (Liu et al., 2020). However, this is not the case with online parasites. Online parasites more accurately see the online community as a channel to obtain information. They pay little attention to perfecting their personally identifiable information because it is not important relative to content. Moreover, they are also extremely talented in various environments and use multiple methods (such as search engines, blogs, SNS, and online communities) to achieve their goal of obtaining information for their own or organizational activities. They often use the “like” and “favorite” functions when they find content useful. It is convenient for them to view such content in the future and integrate it into their own information database or apply it to life and study. Since they are focused more on collecting information than on interacting with other users, they learn more in certain professional fields.

We suggest clarifying the relationships between the inactive user, lurker, and online parasite according to users’ interaction behaviors and perceived contributions to the community. Inactive users use the network passively; they need guidance and stimulation to cope with network changes. Although lurkers often use the internet, they rarely interact with content or other people because they do not want to leave any traces. However, they have a sense of value for their existence. The online parasite pays more attention to content and interacts with the interested parties. They are more self-centered and do not care about their contributions to other people and things, although they may accidentally take actions that contribute to the community.

We have provided a new definition for this category of users and clarified its relationship with similar user types, hoping to create an in-depth understanding of passive users and new insights for online community developers, managers, moderators, and software designers. Moreover, online parasites have abilities and resources to share, if we can find a suitable method to encourage them to produce and contribute content; this can make the online community more active and developed. As with existing methods, in conjunction with a reward mechanism, one could send them invitations and reminders to encourage the production of content to obtain access rights or spiritual or material rewards. Consequently, understanding the evolution and changes of users in the information environment has become particularly important to improve offerings.

The development and evolution of the internet have provided a vast quantity of information resources for internet users to meet their needs. In this draft, we attempted to describe the so-called online parasites who primarily acquire information and knowledge by actively using the internet to achieve their goals. In this study, we explored only the characteristics of online parasites’ interactive behavior and perceived contribution. Although various types of interactive behaviors are performed by users of online communities, these behaviors can be collectively regarded as “digital shadow work” (Park, Lee, Koh, & Ryoo, 2020). While digital shadow work is generally thought to negatively impact consumers’ work behaviors, it is necessary to understand how it affects different types of users differently.

Digital shadow work is likely an important factor in various behaviors among different types of users. Digital shadow work is often understood as all unpaid work that users provide for businesses and organizations in the use of digital services, such as self-service operations. In the case of online communities, lurkers and inactive users minimize interactions with other members of the community and avoid digital shadow work as much as possible because they do not want to expose themselves. In contrast, active users and online parasites fulfill their own needs (e.g., self-expression or information needs) by performing digital shadow work. In addition, the reward mechanisms stipulated by the platform for different types of digital shadow work may also impact how users choose to participate in online communities.

Information has propelled most relationships for which people use the internet. Compared to lurkers or passive receivers who read newspapers many years ago, most internet users now possess a certain degree of enthusiasm, including online parasites. Therefore, conceptualizing online parasites and studying their motivations and behaviors will greatly impact the sustainable development of the internet and virtual community. This study has some theoretical and practical implications, as follows.

First, this draft confirms that information acquisition is a prominent motivation of online parasites, implying that marketers can satisfy the needs of these users by sharing various types of brand content. Although they seldom participate in business communication activities in the online community, they consistently monitor the progress of information, and they are very likely to become engaged in future business activities. Relative to other marketing activities or programs, providing brand content to online parasites is a cost-effective technique.

Second, when conducting business communication activities in online communities, the use of simple messages to promote products and content is usually emphasized. However, providing online parasites with more branded content and information is a relatively cost-effective way to deliver more relevant content and information than other marketing campaigns or programs, since detailed information is more attractive to these users.

Third, this study confirms that online parasites have a network addiction tendency; that is, they spend a substantial amount of time using the internet. Although network addiction is unhealthy for users’ well-being, it provides online marketers with more opportunities to interact with online parasites and promote brand information to them. This study suggests that online parasites are not valueless for firms. Understanding their psychological states and encouraging desired behaviors could help improve the firms’ marketing performance.

Finally, this study supports the following suggestions regarding how to convert lurkers or online parasites into active users. For lurkers, the basic proposed strategy is to reward these users to induce them to post. Compensation can be either intrinsic or extrinsic. Overall, this strategy is a method of quantitatively analyzing user propensity (based on connection frequency, residence time, number of views, interaction, etc.) and developing customized compensation policies. For passive users, the recommended strategy is to invite them to offline events (since even if the response rate is low, a small number will attend) and identify, educate, and utilize them as opinion leaders (Koh & Kim, 2003).

Regarding the limitations of this study, first, the basic questions used in the interview were relatively simple, and more targeted questions should be designed. Limitations also existed in the sampling for the interview, which was a form of convenience sampling. The sampling included only Chinese students in Korea, producing a study sample that was very heterogeneous compared to other groups and very homogeneous within the group. Randomly choosing additional and diversified samples may enhance the validity and the generalizability of the findings. Furthermore, online behavior seems to strongly depend on the type of online communities with which the user interacts with as well as the context. That is, the same user may play different roles in different online communities. Thus, stronger evidence is required to support our conclusion.

Recommendations for future research are as follows. First, due to the limitations of a conceptual study like the present one, our argument still must be empirically validated. To this end, it may be a good method to develop measurement items and conduct quantitative research to provide empirical evidence for this classification. Deeper research is also necessary to explore the understanding of users’ online engagement behavior via focus group interviews. We cannot automatically categorize users into active and inactive users based on quantifiable information, such as the duration of online browsing or posting frequency. Thus, we must develop a sophisticated way of categorizing network users based on both quantity and quality indicators. To validate our idea of user type classification, additional detailed analysis is needed, along with in-depth discussion. In addition, it is desirable to consider more detailed behavioral comparisons between locals and foreigners (such as Korean and Chinese people in South Korea). Furthermore, new and advanced typology-related research on internet users is required.