[Air-l] internet community breakups

[Janne Bromseth]

Hi Ellie -
Interesting study! I was kind of forced to address the issue in my 
dissertation, 'Genre trouble and the body that mattered', as 'my' mailing 
list community died in the course of my ethnography, causing many 
reflections on mailing lists as a social realistic genre, and the elements 
required to keep them going (I'll be glad to send you the Pdf if you're 
interested). In my study the issue of trust and deception is central, and 
highly related to what and who list members imagine the other to be. In my 
group, that was a women-only list for lesbian and bisexual women, four of 
the female participants appeared to be written by one male, and this 
information was perceived as very disturbing by many participants (as they 
had taken for granted that the social rule for a self is 1 body - 1 online 
textual self, that in addition had the 'wrong' body signs regarding 
gender). In the end the list died, mostly because of the feelings of 
distrust that grew as a result of the 'revelation' - but also as the list 
owners did not take social responsibility for keeping a dialogue with the 
list about the issues of re-organizing the list (to a non-anonymous  or 
closed list, stricter routines for signing up etc. Not that it would have 
prevented the same to happen again necessarily, but maybe more to make 
participants feel that their feelings of being emotionally affected was 
taken seriously).

There are of course many different reasons for break-ups of online 
community, depending on community purpose and subject, participants' 
relations to each other, organisation form, leadership etc. In addtion to 
the local specific context, I found it valuable to look at these issues in 
relation to specific interaction genres on one hand and the particular 
challenges of the online textual context on the other. When to comes to 
mailing lists and the issues of trust within contexts that do not have a 
fictional purpose I found an article of Judith Donath very useful, in 
Communities in cyberspace (Kollock and Smith 1999), 'Identity and deception 
in the virtual community'.
  Of course there are also much to learn from studies that address 
'elements of success', that preceeds all cases of break-ups, to look at the 
social frames of what created the success at one point that gradually 
changed (I had much use of Nancy Bayms book naturally, of the successful 
fandom group she studied. In fact my group was also very successful when I 
started my study, and is written as a 'from life to death story', trying to 
identity what characterized the different periods and what it was that 
caused the changes).

If you're interested in methodological issues of studying groups in 
conflict and challenges for the researcher subject, I have also have an 
article about this in Health research in Cyberspace (NOVA Publ 2006, de 
Pranee Liamputtong).

Good luck!

All the best
Janne Bromseth



At 23:13 22.01.2007 -0600, you wrote:
>I'm doing an independent study this semester on the breakup of Internet
>communities, which I've called (for the project) Internet community
>dissolution.  I've been able to find plenty of articles on Internet
>communities and relationships, etc, but I haven't seen any on this topic.
>
>How is this topic generally phrased in the lit?  I came up with absolutely
>no results when I tried searching for it in various forms in my library's
>(pathetic) database.  Can anyone point me in the direction of where to look
>or specific articles on this?
>
>Also, while I'm here, are there any articles out there that address the
>definition and types of internet communities?  I could list them all out
>from my personal experiences, but I'd like to have something published to
>back up what I say.
>
>Thanks!
>Ellie
>_______________________________________________
>The air-l at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
>is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
>Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: 
>http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>
>Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
>http://www.aoir.org/