Christina - my experience has been that this kind of "encounters" on-list as well as responses from individuals off-list, while studying online "communities" are quite common. I have had several such experiences myself, one such led to my dissertation (1998 - see http://www.cyberdiva.org/erniestuff/sanov.html). Of course, the reasons for these encounters are often complex and cannot be generalized across all virtual "communities" since each such community is contextually situated within larger "rl" communities that give rise to situations and issues that perhaps the academics/researchers (and even the list participants themselves) have not considered in depth prior to the attempting the study ( this may not even be possible to do prior to launching your investigation...). Off-list, I will be glad to answer more questions. good luck r At 04:18 PM 7/25/01 -0400, you wrote:

Hi Folks: In investigating quite a different phenomenon, I stumbled across an email list with two quite different contributors to it--both academics interested in talking about the topic on an academic level, and non-academics that seem interested in enthusing and speculating about the subject rather than studying it. Whatever the case, friction has arisen; mostly, non-academics have taken umbrage with the academics, often just for getting into debates (though some are quite heated). Of course, they need not do so--the non-academics could simply "talk amongst themselves," etc. Rather, they treat every contributor as though they should see themselves as members of one community that is governed by one particular ethic. (Hmmm, maybe I did that by my address form above.) Anybody know of research done that talks about this--that is, that talks about this assumption of close community on e-mail lists? Thanks for any suggestions! --Christian Nelson

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