ok, got you - it's these structural properties such as embeddedness in face-to-face communities that make the hope for reciprocity, status and an enhanced network more realistic, and thus facilitate active participation. Am I closer? As a group analyst, I sometimes wonder if online groups have a life and character of their own, which is something more than all the variables we could quantify. I like the idea of embeddedness in face-to-face communities being significant, mind you, and it fits in with my intuition that offering visual (eg videoconference and streaming) facilities is likely to enhance online communication and participation, but that's another story. I just recalled someone relating the development of groups to quantum/chaos theory, and wondering if the opening moments of a group's life might play the most significant role in its future development, online or otherwise. Either way, once some bad dynamics have taken hold, it often feels hard to get a group to move on or be anything different, in my experience. Do any of you have experiences of online groups being stuck in some really unproductive style of interaction, and then, after some moment or process of insight, starting to be more productive, creative etc.? Ben ----- Original Message ----- From: Uwe Matzat To: air-l@aoir.org Sent: Friday, February 08, 2002 2:15 PM Subject: Re: [Air-l] Re: Lurking Dear Ben & others, you asked what 'personal goals' like getting status and making contacts have to do with structural properties of e-groups: the point is that structural properties of electronic groups can influence whether active participation in electronic discussions can be a successful means for a researcher to obtain status or to make new contacts. We do not have to regard a researcher's goal to make new contacts or to gain reputation as personal in nature. These are social goals that are induced by the research system and its career system. If we assume that obtaining reputation and making contacts, to some extent, are intrumental for every researcher's career advancement, the question is which properties of electronic groups link the pursuing of these goals to active participation in e- discussions. An example: Let's assume that a researcher's active participation in e-discussions is driven by the wish to obtain reputation in the academic system. We could then expect that academic mailing lists that are embedded in well-integrated research communities with face-to-face meetings stimulate active participation more than academic mailing list consisting of a less integrated community of researchers, since in the latter you cannot obtain much reputation that is helpful for your career advancement. The idea that a hope for reciprocity may stimulate participation in discussions of electronic group can be traced back to Thorn BK, Connolly T. 1987. "Discretionary Data Bases: A Theory and Some Experimental Findings." Communication Research 14(5):512-28 We can use different models based on different ideas about what drives participation in e-discussions (reputation, contacts, hope for reciprocity) for deriving hypotheses about which structural properties of electronic groups stimulate active participation. I elaborated and tested a number of like-wise hypotheses in my thesis (see last email). Best wishes, Uwe
Uwe,
Sorry if I'm being dense, but you say first that your focus is more on the significant structural properties of electronic groups (eg their embeddedness in face-to-face networks), but then go on to outline the influences on active participation that are very much more personal in nature - hope for reciprocity, status and contact.
Could you clarify.
Thanks,
ben