Dear Emilie, You could research the Usenet. Usenet consist of 143 widely distributed hierarchies with tens of thousands of different groups, nobody knows exactly how many because of the de-centralized allocation of them. Usenet started as one society with only a few groups and still shows signs of that, for example, we can talk about one netiquette. There are many common culturally historical developed norms and interpretations connected to the distinction Usenet/society. The Usenet people defines themselves as a we when talking about non users and when the normal way of communication is broken. This indicates that Usenet is one society, however, this society itself has differentiated into the hierarchies, the groups and their subgroups, subject pointers and threads. The groups have their own border of meaning differentiating them out from the general norms of Usenet and from the other groups. If the complexity of a newsgroup gets too high, e.g. if there are too many relevant topics, a new group form through a bifurcation. On the group level the FAQ is the guideline for good behaviour. The FAQ tells the history of the group and give laws for what to communicate about and how (in what tone). The regulation of the communication is, anyhow, much more complex than can be explained by laws presented in a FAQ. No individuals can determine the structure of the process of communication, only the processes of communication that runs through the structure can alter it. This happens in the process of acceptance and rejection of meaning proposals. The name of each newsgroup begins with the relevant main hierarchy, and terms of increasing specificity are added to this. A typical newsgroup name is alt.music. This could have been one newsgroup and historical seen it has been, but now it is just a second-level name in the hierarchy with 742 actual sub-groups, for instance, alt.music.blues with the three sub-groups: alt.music.blues.delta, alt.music.blues.Johnny-Whinter, and alt.music.blues.lexington-blues. There are about 150 different top-hierarchies each containing a number of second-level hierarchies that each potentially contains a number of sub-groups. The groups I have studied most are groups that communicate animal rights and motorcycles, but they are in Danish. The one about animals has separated out four subgroups e.g. about dogs, and the one about motorcycles has gone through a bifurcation into one about motorcycles and one about mopeds. The members of the first one still communicate in the mother group, while there are an antagonistic relation between the motorcycle folks and the moped folks. Regards Jesper Emilie MARQUOIS-OGEZ wrote:
Hello everyone,
I'm looking for examples of virtual communities that gave bearth to other virtual communities. I mean that the members of one virtual community (a mailing-list for instance) decided to have two virtual communities instead of one. The first one is about a subject and the second one is about another subject (linked to the first one, more specific, for instance).
Have you ever heard of cases like this?
Many thanks.
Regards,
Emilie Marquois-Ogez
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Emilie Marquois-Ogez
Doctorante en informatique
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