| public conversation Readings:
What are some of the ways people acknowledge specific other participants? Do certain people stand out in your impression of the groups you read - if so, why? How are group's boundaries and integrety maintained? What makes newsgroups vulnerable to free-loaders and destructive behaviors? What solutions seem promising? What is reputation in a newsgroup? What social functions does it serve? How can the groups be redefined to enhance this value? Motivation to Participate Participation seems to me to arise from several disparate motivations. Help and fact finding are typified by very different interaction strategies than social interaction and group forming. The latter can often be independent of a discussion's specified topic. A third category of participation motivation seems to be soap-box opinion publishing, debate, and redressing of 'balance', the latter aspect seems to be one of the few situations which draws a large population of non-interacting, observers into posting their opinions. Participation in terms of posting then, is only a small fraction of total 'lurking' participant community. Lurking is probably the largest use of factual discussions (such as computer help), and can been seen as information gathering, browsing and assessment of interest in particular threads. It seems that many users of discussion forums such as usenet treat them as online equivalents journals or magazine public letters' pages - they browse often, skim reading to establish areas (rather than authors in most cases) of interest, occasionally read threads in depth, and very rarely post. There are then a small number of active participants who establish themselves as 'authors', they address each other but often adopt mannerisms of performance rather than styles they would use in private and dyadic interaction. They appear to me to write in a style that demonstrates their awareness of a large reading audience, reaffirms their own perceived position as authors and group members. This is not consistently the case, as the opportunity in online forums for anyone to become an author complicates this simple journal model slightly. One overt example of this performance style is in a heated and largely unproductive shouting match on alt.abortion at one point, one of the two main participants turns to the audience in a theatrical aside, and continues his attack as a summary to 'his public': On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 14:18:53 GMT, "Plonk!" <Plonk!@liberalismisstupid.com> wrote: > Craig Chilton <xanadu222@mchsi.com> wrote: >> "Plonk!" wrote: >>> Craig Chilton <xanadu222@mchsi.com> wrote: >>>> "Plonk!" wrote: >>>>> Craig Chilton <xanadu222@mchsi.com> wrote: >>>>>> "Plonk!" wrote: >>>>>>> Craig Chilton <xanadu222@mchsi.com> wrote: >>>>>>>> "Plonk!" wrote: >>>>>>>>> Craig Chilton <xanadu222@mchsi.com> wrote: >>>>>>>>>> "Plonk!" wrote: >>>>>>>>>>> Craig Chilton <xanadu222@mchsi.com> wrote: >>>>>>>>>>>> Plonk! wrote: >>>>>>>>>>>>> Craig Chilton <xanadu222@mchsi.com> wrote:.. >>>>>>>>>>>>>> "Plonk!" wrote: >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Craig Chilton <xanadu222@mchsi.com> wrote: >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> "Plonk!" wrote: [ ... ] READERS: The overriding point that I've made to this busybody, over and over again, as you can see in the dialogue below, is that neither casual sex NOR abortion are ANYONE'S business other than that of those involved in the sex, or the women who choose the remedy of abortion. It's amazing that the very easy-to-understand phrase, "NONE of your business" seems to be 'WAY beyond his very limited comprehension. A good example of the degree to which Anti-Choicers are profoundly IGNORANT people. The cases of threads or whole groups largely dedicated to mooting - debate for the sake of debate, and those discussion groups which seem entirely focused on point scoring in wit, insult style and aggressive personal attacks obviously draw participants for different reasons again. It seems that these discussions are loosely motivated by successful attack as a measure of group prestige, but may be considered by many as a form of game or personal entertainment. There may also be an element of embattled participants feeling motivated to broadcast strong offline feelings online, or fly a well established 'party line' flag, where usenet is merely considered another channel of 'attack'. Exchange of resources is a further motivation. Providing resources seems to be driven by point scoring resource reputation and in some cases maintenance of "collective goods" such as music, programs, personal contact in other mediums (such as pen pal details), cracks, collectables, etc.. Group Traits So far I have left out romantic and sexual motivations, which Clay Shirky terms "sex talk" in his paper A Group is its Own Worst Enemy http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html, when citing the key (self destructive) features of group interaction identified by W.R. Bion: "You go on IRC and you scan the
channel list, and you say "Oh, I know what that group is about, because
I see the channel label." And you go into the group, you will also
almost invariably find that it's about sex talk as well. Not
necessarily overt. But that is always in scope in human conversations,
according to Bion. That is one basic pattern that groups can always
devolve into, away from the sophisticated purpose and towards one of
these basic purposes."
In some forums, this sex talk tends towards the absolute extreme of hardest sell, aggressively sexual language. It is also interesting to consider what motivates people not to participate. Factors include fear of attack and retribution, uninterest, apathy or cost of participation, feelings of inadequacy and of being an outsider in an 'established group'. Acknowledging Participation Acknowledgement in face to face interaction is dominated by unspoken channels of communication. Gesture, eye line, supportive sounds ("hmm", "u-huh", etc.) are a few of the rich lexicon of acknowledging actions. With these largely stripped from online discussion, acknowledgement becomes much more overt. Participants must openly state their support. Other interaction which could be considered as supportive include mimicking of language or style and addressing points raised in some but not other posts. In answer to the question of whether certain people stand out in my impression of the groups I read, I have difficulty in making anyone stand out. This is probably related to my lack of familiarity with interest mining in forums such as usenet, but in most usenet groups I visited I found the spam, spoofing, bot posts, advertising and other junk so overwhelming that following broader usage patterns of any particular participants (other than in the confines of a particular thread) was almost impossible to me. It is this issue that Fiore, Tiernan and Smith hope to address in their proposal of a filtering system based on newsgroup metrics. The high level of unwanted traffic in most active unmoderated groups is an indication of the system's weaknesses. By providing easy access to subject matter and usage values, newsgroups provide a convenient means for attack of particular discussion topics and communities, and a way for automatic advertising and malicious attackers to track and target the most active groups. Moderator or operator positions within a discussion are one response to this message 'noise', however these systems are labour intensive to maintain and by relying on a few key players, can be limited or overly constrained by these discussion police. Another reaction to irresponsibility in posting is to produce an online 'gated community' with a high level of offline reputation migrated into the online environment on joining (one example of an aspect of this, is the credit card identification process now in place for new e-bay users). Collaborative filtering methods and less forceful online reputation systems seem like a middle ground, and show possibilities of becoming strong tools in information mining and reducing unsolicited or unwanted overload. Reputation is difficult to gauge in many online forums because of the presentation of topic rather than author centric information. Reputation can be established among regular users of a discussion group, but this reputation stands for little to those with only weak ties to the group, and to the much larger lurking population, as well as those with malicious or aggressive intent. Kollock and Smith succinctly summarises the situation in online forums such as usenet: "One of the broad lessons that we draw
from the social organization of the Usenet is that cyberspace has a
double edge: monitoring the behavior of others becomes easier while
sanctioning undesirable behavior becomes more difficult; the costs of
communication between members of a large group are decreased while the
effects of defecting are often amplified; and the existence of several
thousand newsgroups makes it easy for individuals to find others who
share specific interests and goals but also makes those who want to
disrupt those groups able to find them. Thus, there is no simple
conclusion to this story, and one-note predictions of either a utopian
or dystopian future must be considered suspect."
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