[Air-l] Re: Lurking

[Ben Davidson]

ok, got you - it's these structural properties such as embeddedness in
face-to-face communities that make the hope for reciprocity, status and an
enhanced network more realistic, and thus facilitate active participation.
Am I closer?

As a group analyst, I sometimes wonder if online groups have a life and
character of their own, which is something more than all the variables we
could quantify.  I like the idea of embeddedness in face-to-face communities
being significant, mind you, and it fits in with my intuition that offering
visual (eg videoconference and streaming) facilities is likely to enhance
online communication and participation, but that's another story.

I just recalled someone relating the development of groups to quantum/chaos
theory, and wondering if the opening moments of a group's life might play
the most significant role in its future development, online or otherwise.

Either way, once some bad dynamics have taken hold, it often feels hard to
get a group to move on or be anything different, in my experience.

Do any of you have experiences of online groups being stuck in some really
unproductive style of interaction, and then, after some moment or process of
insight, starting to be more productive, creative etc.?

Ben







----- Original Message -----
From: Uwe Matzat
To: air-l at aoir.org
Sent: Friday, February 08, 2002 2:15 PM
Subject: Re: [Air-l] Re: Lurking


Dear Ben & others,

you asked what 'personal goals' like getting status and making contacts have
to do with structural properties of e-groups:

the point is that structural properties of electronic groups can influence
whether active participation in electronic discussions can be a successful
means for a researcher to obtain status or to make new contacts.

We do not have to regard a researcher's goal to make new contacts or to gain
reputation as personal in nature. These are social goals that are induced by
the research system and its career system.

If we assume that obtaining reputation and making contacts, to some extent,
are intrumental for every researcher's career advancement, the question is
which properties of electronic groups link the pursuing of these goals to
active participation in e- discussions.

An example: Let's assume that a researcher's active participation in
e-discussions is driven by the wish to obtain reputation in the academic
system. We could then expect that academic mailing lists that are embedded
in well-integrated research communities with face-to-face meetings stimulate
active participation more than academic mailing list consisting of a less
integrated community of researchers, since in the latter you cannot obtain
much reputation that is helpful for your career advancement.

The idea that a hope for reciprocity may stimulate participation in
discussions of electronic group can be traced back to

Thorn BK, Connolly T. 1987. "Discretionary Data Bases: A Theory and Some
Experimental Findings." Communication Research 14(5):512-28
We can use different models based on different ideas about what drives
participation in e-discussions (reputation, contacts, hope for reciprocity)
for deriving hypotheses about which structural properties of electronic
groups stimulate active participation.

I elaborated and tested a number of like-wise hypotheses in my thesis (see
last email).

Best wishes,
Uwe


> Uwe,
>
> Sorry if I'm being dense, but you say first that your focus is more on the
> significant structural properties of electronic groups (eg their
> embeddedness in face-to-face networks), but then go on to outline the
> influences on active participation that are very much more personal in
> nature - hope for reciprocity, status and contact.
>
> Could you clarify.
>
> Thanks,
>
> ben