Community and Internet Discussion Groups An Informal List of Features that Differentiate E-Mail Discussion Communities from Groups that Disseminate Information
Michael Day
This list was inspired by a question from Van Souza to the TechRhet discussion group on November 23rd, 2001. Van asked, in part, what aspects or features differentiate lists or discussion groups that are 'virtual communities' from other special interest e-mail groups.
- My favorite source for answers to questions like this one is Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community, which is now out in a new edition from MIT Press with added material. When you do a search for that book on Amazon.com, lots of interesting and related books come up too.
- In community lists, participants seem to be willing to share more personal information about themselves, such as birthdays, professional successes, births, problems not totally related to the subject of the list, etc. In general, participants in dissemination lists will not tolerate off-topic messages, and a moderator may insure that these messages don't get through.
- In community lists, participants seem to want to get to know each other. They often meet or plan to meet face-to-face, or engage in "backchannel" personal messages for one-on-one communication.
- In community lists, the general tone of conversation is forgiving of errors and shows a concern for the welfare of the participants. On dissemination lists, people who make mistakes get flamed on a regular basis and participants don't show a great deal of compassion for each other.
- Especially in professional listservs, one sees a tendency for subgroups to spin off smaller projects that take on a life of their own apart from the list, but often get reported back to the larger list. I see this less in dissemination lists.
- Participants in community lists usually exhibit a sense of having an identity as a group. They have names and nicknames and lore about their group, and these names and stories come up frequently in list discussion. List-specific humor often emerges.
- Rheingold mentions what he calls the "gift economy" of the Internet in The Virtual Community. I think that on community lists, participants are more willing to share freely with their expertise since they have already been helped in the past and know that others will help them again in the future. Rheingold compares this value exchange to a barter economy. List members develop "social capital" over time as they respond to others with advice, resources, and compassion. This social capital makes others want to respond to them when they send requests to the list.
- Mary Tigner-Rasanen adds that members of community liststervs seem to use the same 'problem solving' strategies for interpersonal disputes that they might use in their own personal lives. In other words, they behave as if the relationships are as important as the content, and expend energy toward resolving conflict in a way that allows the relationships to 'reconcile' and continue. Secondly, affective support is as forthcoming as intellectual and practical support, and third, even when the information given is professional rather than personal, storytelling is an accepted and often preferred method of giving it.
- Jeff Rice adds that just as communities infight and hurt one another, so might listserv communities. Not all discourse is supportive, and some is quite antagonistic. It is a reminder of Lyotard's point in The Postmodern Condition that the postmodern language game (to which we might include the listserv) is agonistic. Van Sousa's experiences bear out this point: some groups take pains to avoid conflict, while others seem to revel in flaming language and lively debates. We might say that each community list develops its own expectations for netiquette in online discussion.
- Van Sousa notes that on one formal WebCT list in Brazil, people address each other with a very formal "Prezado" greeting, followed by the last name. But in his own class lists, the students call him by his first name.
- Van also points out that on MOO lists, participants have the option of addressing each other by their character names. It occurred to me that in community lists, we sometimes address each other by our MOO names. For example, I'm perfectly comfortable being addressed as "mday" in online communities. Rheingold discusses this phenomenon of assuming a different name and personality, but we can also find further treatment in books like Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck and Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen, as well as Julian Dibble's now famous "A Rape in Cyberpace" article.
- Van notes that in community lists, participants have little difficulty getting a thread going and replying to each other in discussions of four posts or more. In other groups, members seem reluctant to respond to each other, even when provoked.
- Tari Fanderclai reminds us that rules, stated or unstated, have a powerful role in the development, survival, and evolution of online communities. Follow this link to read more of her observations.
- Nick Carbone found another good article on how news services foster (or not!) community in their online dicsussion group.
This list is by no means finished. Send mail to Michael Day to add to this resource!
Last updated November 24, 2001 by Michael Day