[Air-l] "Death" of a website

[Joao Vieira da Cunha]

Ralph,

I am looking at a similar phenomenon (with the difference that mine is 
located within the corporate world) and there are two lenses that I found 
useful:

1) The social movements literature. Some of the supporting structures of 
social movements such as strikes have different life spans. In my case, an 
intranet based newsgroup had major activity for a couple of years but then 
was reduced to nothing because of the investment in reputation and emotion 
that participation entailed. I am very much indebted to my colleague Karim 
Lakhani (lakhani at mit.edu) for introducing me to this literature and he has 
an interesting piece of research looking at virtual open-source software 
communities using the social movements lens. You may also want to get in 
touch with gim.

2) The literature on anthropology. In my own research, I have found that 
virtual spaces tend to provide 'liminal' spaces where people can carry 
rituals and activities that they would not be willing or able to in RL.

I'd be interested in  hearing more about your own lenses,

Thanks

Joao

PhD Student / MIT Sloan

At 01:02 PM 3/26/2002 -0600, you wrote:
>AOIR:
>I am working on a project in which I am looking at several activism
>websites that were the home of a great deal of communication (bbs,
>chats, etc.) for a period of a few years, but whose activity has since
>dwindled to nothing. This despite the fact that the organization they were
>so boldly against still exists and still operates as it always has. My guess
>at this stage of the project is that I will use current community/identity
>research as a way to explain this phenomenon, but I wanted to throw this
>out to the list: Is anyone aware of instances in which this research has
>been used as I intend it? And/or are there other approaches you may be
>aware of that I am missing and which would better inform my paper? Your
>help is appreciated.
>
>Ralph Siddall
>ralph-siddall at uiowa.edu
>
>Ralph W. Siddall
>The University of Iowa
>Department of Communication Studies
>Department of Rhetoric
>(319) 335-0178
>
>
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