Mike wrote:
The "Free Rider" concept suggests to me that the value of e-lists are in their content. Rather, I would suggest, the real value of an e-list comes from participation, thus those who are only "monitoring/lurking" are not getting as much value from the list (feedback, recognition, networking and so on), as those who are actively participating.
I agree... but, you're also dealing with other issues of group-dynamics here, and some of them are more 'technical' than social... I mean, with this list of say, 600 subscribers, not all could post on a regular basis because that would mean too much traffic for the subscribers, exponential curves and such. The traffic on this list is rather high as it is and I don't know how others deal with it, but I have 1) too many unread messages in my Air-L folder and 2) unfortunately delete quite a lot of messages after having scanned the subject and first couple of lines of the message. I thank the many lurkers on this list for keeping the traffic in almost manageable bounds. Frank. -who will try not posting too often. -- The Cyberculture, Identity and Gender Resources ==> http://fragment.nl/resources/