Just a brief question here concerning the following item:
If the metric is low your group is pretty egalitarian, if the metric is high you have a clique generating most of the content. The metric would be most meaningful if you could compare it to another group's metric, so if you did this over several sample periods, you could say whether the distribution of message posts was getting more or less egalitarian / elitist as the list was evolving.
Is the definition of egalitarianism and elitism being used here purely a quantitative concept? Or, would one argue that the actual amount of messages generated by a single individual determines the fact that the person has become part of a dominant elite in a newsgroup? I am not sure about the conclusions one could draw from numbers alone, it seems very open ended. One may be extremely lonely and thus seeking attention in posting a large number of messages. One may be a determined spammer, and be reviled by the newsgroup, a case where a large number of messages actually influences the group's perception of one's 'low status' within the group. In very limited experience of my own, those actually seen as the dominant elite members of a list often lurk, rarely responding or posting, and often ignoring the many 'vocal' attempts by some members to drag them into debates. When these elite members do post, the messages often show careless indifference in construction, multiple spelling errors, strange accidental capitalizations midway through a word (almost as if to say, "I'm not used to typing, my secretary normally does that."). What do you think? Cheers, Max. Dr. Maximilian C. Forte Assistant Professor Dept. of Anthropology and Sociology University College of Cape Breton 1250 Grand Lake Road P.O. Box 5300 Sydney, NS B1P-6L2, Canada E-mail: max_forte@uccb.ca Faculty Web page: http://faculty.uccb.ns.ca/mforte/ Office B.273 Telephone: 902-563-1947