[Air-l] CFP:SIGGROUP Bulletin special issue on Virtual Communities:

[jeremy hunsinger]

Call for Submissions: SIGGROUP Bulletin special issue on Virtual 
Communities: ''Less of You, More of Us: The Political Economy of Power 
in Virtual Communities''

Editors:

  Jason Nolan, Knowledge Media Design Institute, University of Toronto

  Jeremy Hunsinger, Center for Digital Discourse and Culture, Virginia 
Tech

Submissions due January 15, 2005

''Less of You, More of Us: The Political Economy of Power in Virtual 
Communities''

  The goal is to bring into the dialogue a number of researchers on 
virtual community who are looking at the borders and peripheral 
locations that are ignored, unknown or explicitly overlooked. Within 
the notion that community, often the walls we build around ourselves 
form  mechanism of power and preference, this issue will examine online 
communities that are excluded or self-excluding from the dominant 
forms, norms and discourses. For example, there are a large number of 
researchers inquiring into the recent blogging phenomenon, but I have 
heard many explicitly exclude technologies/communities such as 
LiveJournal.com with his 3.8 million users (1.7 active), and discount 
the value of  teenage bloggers, who are mostly female (67% of 
Livejournal users). Because researchers tend to cover familiar 
territories, we encourage authors to explore alternatives. Our issue 
will provide researchers with the opportunity to expose the readership 
to a wider sense of virtual community and what is going on at the edges 
of the event horizon.

  Some of the anticipated themes are: hacking virtual community; the 
overlooked, broken down, subverted or reconceptualized virtual 
communities; borders and breaches, the ordering of virtual community; 
hacktivism; sexually focused virtual communities; questioning the value 
of online community; collective intelligence is just the fordism of the 
mind; the Slash Fiction communities; MOOs the early forgotten virtual 
communities; and the code beneath the community - exploring programmer 
and system administrative communities.

  Submissions should be sent to both: jason.nolan at utoronto.ca and 
jhuns at vt.edu
  Web site: http://www.acm.org/sigs/siggroup

Jeremy Hunsinger
Center for Digital Discourse and Culture
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