Ralph, I am looking at a similar phenomenon (with the difference that mine is located within the corporate world) and there are two lenses that I found useful: 1) The social movements literature. Some of the supporting structures of social movements such as strikes have different life spans. In my case, an intranet based newsgroup had major activity for a couple of years but then was reduced to nothing because of the investment in reputation and emotion that participation entailed. I am very much indebted to my colleague Karim Lakhani (lakhani@mit.edu) for introducing me to this literature and he has an interesting piece of research looking at virtual open-source software communities using the social movements lens. You may also want to get in touch with gim. 2) The literature on anthropology. In my own research, I have found that virtual spaces tend to provide 'liminal' spaces where people can carry rituals and activities that they would not be willing or able to in RL. I'd be interested in hearing more about your own lenses, Thanks Joao PhD Student / MIT Sloan At 01:02 PM 3/26/2002 -0600, you wrote:
AOIR: I am working on a project in which I am looking at several activism websites that were the home of a great deal of communication (bbs, chats, etc.) for a period of a few years, but whose activity has since dwindled to nothing. This despite the fact that the organization they were so boldly against still exists and still operates as it always has. My guess at this stage of the project is that I will use current community/identity research as a way to explain this phenomenon, but I wanted to throw this out to the list: Is anyone aware of instances in which this research has been used as I intend it? And/or are there other approaches you may be aware of that I am missing and which would better inform my paper? Your help is appreciated.
Ralph Siddall ralph-siddall@uiowa.edu
Ralph W. Siddall The University of Iowa Department of Communication Studies Department of Rhetoric (319) 335-0178
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