As I mentioned in a diary I wrote back in January, I'm working on an ethnographic study of Daily Kos. What that mostly means at the moment is that I spend a lot of time here, take notes about how I use the site and what I notice others doing, and submit my notes to my participant observation class/workshop every few weeks for discussion. (Don't worry, if I ever publish this I'll use pseudonyms for all our user names - it'll be doubly pseudonymous!)
It also means I'm reading the academic literature about online communities and specifically on political blogging. I thought folks here might like to knows some of what academics are saying about "us" - and I'd like to know your thoughts to the academic take on things. This diary will focus on articles about internet communities in general. I'll post another one on Friday reviewing the literature about politics and the internet.
Want to know what academics have to say about internet communities? Want to explain what you know from actually being here? Read on...
(I've linked to all articles mentioned; links with a "*" require subscription/academic affiliation to read the whole article, but should at least take you to an abstract - or if it's a book, just take you to a bookseller's page on that book. This review is focused on just a sampling of journal articles and is certainly by no means a comprehensive review of all writing on internet communities - though I did hit a number of the most-cited articles, at least according to Google Scholar. A lot of internet scholarship has focused on thinking through differences between online interaction and in-person interaction; below are some of the key points along those lines.)
Despite many authors’ concern that the internet is too disconnected a ‘site’ to foster real community (e.g. Putnam 2000*), a number of studies have shown that people do indeed develop meaningful relationships through online communication. Katz et al (2001*) found, in a series of national telephone polls, that many people develop face-to-face friendships with people they’ve met online. McKenna et al (2002*) found that those who share intimate information with others in Usenet groups are likely to develop close relationships which extend into other areas of their lives, and that most of these relationships lasted at least two years. In an ethnography of an online support group for a rare form of brain cancer, Thomsen et al (1998) showed the deep connections users developed with one another.
Kossacks won't be surprised by any of the above, except maybe that there was ever a question about the potential for starting friendships online. How many of you have made "real life" friends from dkos? How many of you feel close to people here, even if you haven't met them in "real life"?
One prominent feature of internet "communities," according to both Thomsen et al (above) and Donath (1996) is the development of jargon known only to group members. In the cancer support group Thomsen et al studied, most of the jargon had to do with medical procedures and was not internet specific. But in the Usenet communities Donath examined, the special terms were not merely reflections of "real-world" terms, but were developed solely for internet use.
Golder and Donath (2004) are worth discussing in more depth, as they outline a useful way of thinking about internet communities, and describe a number of features I think are present on Daily Kos and throughout online communities. They studied Usenet groups, which they argue we should think of as "speech communities" because they have
their own rules for using and interpreting language. These rules can be stylistic, involving standards for capitalization and punctuation, or lexical, where specialized for common words or acronyms may arise. (p. 5)
One thing you might notice about a lot of these articles is they are largely about usenet groups, and relatedly are relatively old in internet time. Does this all apply equally to blogs like dkos? I'd say the point about site-specific jargon is certainly applicable to dkos. We use some terms that are common across the tubes (like "tubes" for example, and "troll" as noun and verb, and the verb "to flame" and its variants). But we've also got a lot of dkos-specific (or at least, left-blog-network-specific) language - IOKIYAR, donuts, all sorts of nasty nicknames for republicans we don't like, the whole "republican-american" meme - what else can you think of?
In order to participate effectively in these communities, users must have "communicative competence" that is specific for each community. Golder and Donath cite another study (Whittaker et al*) which found "massive participation inequality" in Usenet groups - 2.9% of participants wrote 25% of messages while 27% wrote only one message ever (6). They argue that due to the great inequality in participation among internet users, a "user’s participation frequency has a strong impact on the role he or she can play." Less time committed to the group means less contribution, which in turn means less reputation and prestige and so a marginal role in the group – and the inverse, of course, is equally true – more participation leads to more esteem (6). I’m not convinced that high participation will necessarily lead to higher esteem, but it seems likely that it’s difficult to get a lot of esteem without a lot of participation.
What do you all think about the correlation between participation and esteem? can you think of users here who participate a little but are well-regarded by some measure? And further, how do you think about or measure "esteem" here? Number of recs for comments and recommended diaries are certainly one measure, but I don't think we all go around tallying recs to get our sense of who's "big" here...
Golder and Donath then identify six common roles in Usenet groups, which they relate to both the amount and the type of participation. Four of their key terms - "troll" "lurker" "flame" and "newbie" – are used in many internet communities. Their 6 types are:
- The "celebrity" is someone who’s been in the group a long time, has devoted a lot of time to it, and who is therefore considered and treated as an authority in the group. Other users may discuss or refer to "celebrities" even in their absence, and celebrities have more leeway to shape the group or stray from group norms than other users.
- The "newbie" on the other hand is a low-status user. Newbies are, of course, newcomers to a group. They often make mistakes in group etiquette.
- The "lurker" is one who watches but doesn’t participate – many groups actually encourage lurking before attempting to become part of a group. There are also three negative group rolls – the troll, the flamer, and the ranter.
- "Trolls" are users who are there simply to disrupt; they often start out pretending to be interested in participating like any other user, but then bait other participants in order to try to start fights.
- "Flamers" are those who are just directly and overtly hostile from the beginning – it’s a much less sophisticated form of disruption.
- "Ranters" are those who disrupt with an agenda – for example, a radical environmentalist who berates scientists in their Usenet groups for their lack of environmental concern (19-20).
Do these sound right to you? would you add others? We've got a lot of subspecies of trolls here, and in dkos usage "ranter" and "flamer" are both sub-types of "trolls."
Another important feature of online communities, according to Golder & Donath, is boundary enforcement – the work that celebrities and regular users do to ensure that newbies adhere to the rules, to distinguish genuine newbies from trolls and other disruptive types, and to keep the disruption from trolls, flamers and ranters to a minimum.
Does this sound like something we see here to you? It does to me... there's the built-in mechanisms for boundary-enforcement like troll-rating, but then there's also lots of "boundary-enforcement" against folks whose politics aren't in line with the site's, or just folks who post diaries that should be comments, etc etc. What have you noticed? Is boundary enforcement a good way to think about some things that happen here?
While much of the above scholarship focused on Usenet communities, which have been around since at least the early 90s, blogs are a newer phenomenon. Blogging has grown rapidly since 2001 (Nardi et al 2004). The Pew Internet Report on Blogging (2005) found that blog readership increased 58% during 2004 alone. Based on two telephone surveys, they estimate that 120 million adults in the US use the internet; of those, 27% read blogs, 12% comment on blogs, and 7% of created a blog. But only 38% of all internet users even knew what a blog was. They also found that:
Much of the attention to blogs focused on those that covered the recent political campaign and the media. And at least some of the overall growth in blog readership is attributable to political blogs. Some 9% of internet users said they read political blogs "frequently" or "sometimes" during the campaign.
Friday I'll post a 2nd diary reviewing the academic writing about political blogs.
So, what do you think about the above? helpful? interesting? wrong? Know of other good (better?) scholarship on internet communities worth reading?
I'd love to talk about any or all of this, especially in terms of how it relates to daily kos! (see the questions interspersed throughout for things to discuss - and I've included a poll, too - it should say "how much time do you spend here in a more or less average week?" but it got cut off.)
Bibliography
Donath, Judith. 1996. "Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community." Prepared for inclusion in Kollock, P. and Smith M. (eds). Communities in Cyberspace. London: Routledge. http://smg.media.mit.edu/...
Golder, Scott A. and Judith Donath. 2004. "Social Roles in Electronic Communities." Paper prepared for the Association of Internet Researchers conference Internet Research 5.0. http://web.media.mit.edu/...
Katz, James, Ronald E. Rice and Philip Apsden. "The Internet, 1995-2000: Access, Civic Involvement, and Social Interaction." American Behavioral Scientist. 45(3): 405-419.
McKenna Katelyn Y. A., Amie S. Green, Marci E. J. Gleason. 2002. "Relationship Formation on the Internet: What's the Big Attraction?" Journal of Social Issues. 58(1):9–31.
Nardi, Bonnie A., Diane J. Schiano, Michelle Gumbrecht and Luke Swartz. 2004. "Why We Blog." Communications of the ACM. 47:41-46.
Parks, Malcolm R. and Lynn D. Roberts. 1998. "`Making Mosaic': The Development of Personal Relationships on Line and a Comparison to their Off-Line Counterparts." Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. 15(4):517-537.
Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Touchstone.
Raine, Lee. 2005. "The State of Blogging." Data memo for Pew/Internet. http://www.pewinternet.org/...
Thomsen Steven R., Joseph D. Straubhaar and Drew M. Bolyard. 1998. "Ethnomethodology and the study of online communities: exploring the cyber streets." Information Research. 4(1). http://informationr.net/...