Quentin, I'd like to read more. Is the PhD online anywhere? First, what are 'non-linear feedback loops' and what is 'asymptote'? Thanks, Ben ----- Original Message ----- From: "Quentin (Gad) Jones" <qgjones@acm.org> To: <air-l@aoir.org> Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2002 4:36 AM Subject: Re: [Air-l] case studies of mailinglists

geert lovink wrote:

...

Dear Air-l,

for my PhD at the University of Melbourne I have recently written a few

case

...

studies of mailinglist communities. Now I am winding up this project and for the introduction and conclusion I would like to refer to a few similar case studies, but I can't find all that many of them. Does anyone have a suggestion? It could be studies about virtual communities but that's perhaps a bit too broad. I am in particularly interested in internal dynamics and issues of sustainability. Any reference is most welcome.

BTW. I do like the (new) afterword Howard Rheingold wrote for his Virtual Community book which MIT Press reprinted recently. I am not sure how welknown this text is. It's a good and honest reassessment of his passions.

My PhD was in this area but by large scale analysis of discourse dynamics and I was born in Sydney Australia.

A couple of months ago I submitted a paper to Information Systems Research that compares usenet and listserv sustainablity patterns.

The abstract is given below

The Boundaries of Virtual Communities: From Virtual Settlements to the Discourse Dynamics of Virtual Publics By: Quentin (Gad) Jones

This thesis argues that most examinations of the public online behavior of Internet users have been in terms of "virtual community", with researchers using social theory and generally adopting ethnomethodology or a social network approach. Furthermore, that these approaches underplay the fact that builders of online interaction systems impact on the behavior of users through the architecture of the spaces they create. As a result, there is a need for information system researchers to examine the nature of the relationship between the virtual spaces typically used for public online behavior, their technological platforms, and the behaviors such systems contain. This alternate focus, which is adopted in this thesis, moves the emphasis away from notions of community, and its attention to people and their relations, to the nature of the containership of virtual spaces and the boundaries such places impose on online behavior.

In both virtual and physical places, communication technologies can be seen as enablers of only a limited range of social interactions. However, prior to the writing of this thesis, recognition of this fact has not coincided with a research framework or clear methodology for exploring the relationship between online space and behavior. As a result, a new framework is proposed here to systematically investigate the enabling and constraining nature of virtual publics. Virtual publics are defined as symbolically delineated computer mediated spaces such as email lists, newsgroups, IRC Channels etc., whose existence is relatively transparent and open, so groups of individuals are able to attend and contribute to a similar set of computer-mediated interpersonal interactions. Axiomatic to this new approach is the notion that limitations to virtual public behavior result not simply from the nature of the technologies under study, but also from the collective impact of innate human cognitive processing constraints. These constraints, when reached by users trying to process overloaded online discourse, are hypothesized to result in non-linear feedback loops acting on virtual public interaction dynamics. Such system effects are not easily identified by normative or experimental studies which have a tendency to cloud the range of possible behaviors. For this reason, the methodology applied here is large-scale field studies of virtual public mass interaction dynamics.

By a detailed analysis of 2.65 million USENET messages posted to 600 newsgroups over a 6-month period, three effects of the hypothesized non-linear feedback loops are examined. These are: 1) that until asymptote, users are more likely to generate simpler responses as the overloading of mass-interaction increases; 2) that until asymptote, users are more likely to respond to simpler messages in overloaded mass interaction; and 3) that until asymptote, users are more likely to end active participation as the overloading of mass-interaction increases. The relationship between the hypothesized non-linear feedback loops and technology type is also examined empirically by comparing the Usenet data with that of 478,240 email messages sent to 487 email lists managed by Listserv software over a 5-month period.

Statistical analysis of the Usenet data demonstrated the existence of the hypothesized effects and supports the assertion that individual 'information overload' coping strategies have an observable impact on mass interaction discourse dynamics. This thesis is the first empirical exploration of Usenet discourse for systems effects. The comparative analysis of the email and Usenet data also demonstrated the relationship between discourse dynamics and technology type.

The thesis has a number of important implications for designers and managers of virtual publics including methods for understanding the viability of the discourse and user stability associated with various virtual public types. It also provides a means for understanding the usability of various computer mediated communication technologies in group-level terms. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the theoretical work suggests a new research paradigm for the examination of online behavior that is progressive in nature and leads to the discovery of hitherto unknown novel facts.

_______________________________________________ Air-l mailing list Air-l@aoir.org http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l

Quentin, You should consider the possibility that whoever told you that keeping your thesis offline was a good idea may be wrong. My first book, some of which was based on my dissertation, pre-sold over 500 copies by being available online in free full-text, which is good for dissertation in a field as narrow as instructional technology. (See http://reusability.org/read/). It continues to be freely available online, and people keep buying the book because either (a) they don't want to read 350pp on their monitor, and/or (b) it costs about the same to print the whole thing out as it does to buy the book. Seems like the only reason not to put your thesis online involves "information hording" of some kind... Just my $0.02 worth of experience, David Quentin (Gad) Jones wrote:

I'd like to read more. Is the PhD online anywhere?

I haven't put the entire thesis online yet because I have just started a new job and because I am thinking through advice I have received not to put the entire work online (It is 250+ 10 point single spaced). I am also thinking about turning it into a book.