Hi Ellie - Interesting study! I was kind of forced to address the issue in my dissertation, 'Genre trouble and the body that mattered', as 'my' mailing list community died in the course of my ethnography, causing many reflections on mailing lists as a social realistic genre, and the elements required to keep them going (I'll be glad to send you the Pdf if you're interested). In my study the issue of trust and deception is central, and highly related to what and who list members imagine the other to be. In my group, that was a women-only list for lesbian and bisexual women, four of the female participants appeared to be written by one male, and this information was perceived as very disturbing by many participants (as they had taken for granted that the social rule for a self is 1 body - 1 online textual self, that in addition had the 'wrong' body signs regarding gender). In the end the list died, mostly because of the feelings of distrust that grew as a result of the 'revelation' - but also as the list owners did not take social responsibility for keeping a dialogue with the list about the issues of re-organizing the list (to a non-anonymous or closed list, stricter routines for signing up etc. Not that it would have prevented the same to happen again necessarily, but maybe more to make participants feel that their feelings of being emotionally affected was taken seriously). There are of course many different reasons for break-ups of online community, depending on community purpose and subject, participants' relations to each other, organisation form, leadership etc. In addtion to the local specific context, I found it valuable to look at these issues in relation to specific interaction genres on one hand and the particular challenges of the online textual context on the other. When to comes to mailing lists and the issues of trust within contexts that do not have a fictional purpose I found an article of Judith Donath very useful, in Communities in cyberspace (Kollock and Smith 1999), 'Identity and deception in the virtual community'. Of course there are also much to learn from studies that address 'elements of success', that preceeds all cases of break-ups, to look at the social frames of what created the success at one point that gradually changed (I had much use of Nancy Bayms book naturally, of the successful fandom group she studied. In fact my group was also very successful when I started my study, and is written as a 'from life to death story', trying to identity what characterized the different periods and what it was that caused the changes). If you're interested in methodological issues of studying groups in conflict and challenges for the researcher subject, I have also have an article about this in Health research in Cyberspace (NOVA Publ 2006, de Pranee Liamputtong). Good luck! All the best Janne Bromseth At 23:13 22.01.2007 -0600, you wrote:
I'm doing an independent study this semester on the breakup of Internet communities, which I've called (for the project) Internet community dissolution. I've been able to find plenty of articles on Internet communities and relationships, etc, but I haven't seen any on this topic.
How is this topic generally phrased in the lit? I came up with absolutely no results when I tried searching for it in various forms in my library's (pathetic) database. Can anyone point me in the direction of where to look or specific articles on this?
Also, while I'm here, are there any articles out there that address the definition and types of internet communities? I could list them all out from my personal experiences, but I'd like to have something published to back up what I say.
Thanks! Ellie _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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