Murder, intrigue, suspense!

(Actually, just an online community of very nice people).

I liked the way Nika structured her post--I think I'll try that for my community. According to the different ways that identity runs parallel to practice . . .

Identity as a BaWer (or a regular Webhead for that matter) isn't a label as it is way of doing things. The only people who explicitly identify themselves as BaWers and Webheads are those who participate in--and thus experience--community life. Someone asked me at the ExpoSItion if I was a BaWer, and I just couldn't bring myself to say that I was one because as  someone studying the community, I observe, rather than participate in, community life. Identity is lived.

The authors quote a study arguing that "[the common identity and the common bond] perspectives might instead be viewed as describing two separable processes in the development and maintenance of groups" (p.5), but Ren et als. later discussion and speculation of how identity-based attachment might shift over time to bond-based attachment suggests these two notions are not so easily separable.

If one was to view these two types of bonding as separable, then an e-community could be structured so that information-seeking (i.e., common identity) members could have a designated place where the conversation is always on-topic, and members looking to socialize (i.e., common bond) members could have an informal, commons area. Yet the trade-off of doing this, the authors point out, would be to make it difficult for members seeking both types of bonds to go about their business, and also for common identity-based relationships to develop into common bond-based relationships.

In chapter 1, Minow points out several paradoxes, both in terms of identity and in terms of the the political pluralism that mirrors it.

Paradoxes of identity:

1. Individual efforts to express unique experiences, based on membership in oppressed groups, resonate with broad audiences as universal tales (p.23).
2. The recognition that each person is ultimately unique and alone must be somehow reconciled with the acknowledgment of this as a universal, common human condition (p.24).

Paradoxes of political pluralism:

1. A tolerant political system must, to some degree, tolerate the intolerant (p.25)
2. A pluralist political system enables apparent autonomy for subcommunities while subjecting them all to centralized permission, which sets the scope of their autonomy (p.25).

Critique and Connections

Chapter Summary

Burkhalter makes the case that, despite the seeming 'color blindness' of the computer monitor, race is no less relevent onlilne than it is offline, and that in fact racial stereotypes can be even more influential and resilient in online venues such as the Usenet.

In establishing this, Burkhalter makes a number of interesting comparisons between online (Usenet) and offline interactions. Here are some highlights:

In offline interaction, individuals may use another's racial identity to make assumptions about their perspectives, beliefs and attitudes. Online interaction uses an individual's perspectives, beliefs and attitudes to make assumptions about the individual's racial identity. (62)

Summary

Cummings et al. begin by observing that understanding the impact of the Internet on social relationships requires us to ask two types of questions:

1. How does CMC affect the quality of social interactions and relationships?
2. Does CMC supplement communication with existing friends and family, or does it substitute for "more traditional communication and social ties"?

 In the rest of the article, they go on to address the first question and conclude that CMC, particularly email, is less valuable for building and sustaining close relationships.

Critique

Like Nika and Xiaomu, I'm having a hard time seeing why it is so critical, according to Wenger, that brokers not be full members in the communities they bridge. Sun-mi suggests this might be just a definitional problem, and Ayca thinks that its not the degree of membership that matters, but the broker's ability to make connections. I think it is probably a defnitional problem, because we seem to be finding at least a few cases (e.g., Nika's example and mine below) where effective brokers are full members of at least one CoP they represent, if not all.

An intriguing point I'd like to discuss is Sunstein's observation that:

Even if the "information diet" of many individuals is homogenous or insufficiently diverse, society as a whole might have a more richer and fuller set of ideas. (Ch.3, Pg.75)

 . . . a kind of "division of labor" argument of information consumption and opinion advocacy, where the focus is on society as a whole, and not any one individual. This system can only function to the benefit of all, however, if everyone is "doing their part" and there is a sufficient spread of people attending to all of the "parts". In the real labor market, this is not a problem: people need to work in order to live, and jobs will be created wherever they are needed to support the functioning of society. The economic functioning  of our society is, for the most part, self-correcting. But what about the intellectual functioning of a healthy society?

I took a few extra paragraphs to explain the  more technical concepts and terminology to a more general audience (i.e., my community), so I'm a few lines over the 8-page limit. 

Chapter Description

In this chapter, Powazek talks about another 'dirty little secret' of e-communities:  that they all, at some time, must come to an end. Comparing them to break-ups in personal relationships, he adds that, depending on how you orchestrate the community's ending, they can either end in anger and betrayal, or respect and understanding. If they are truly like relationship endings, then most likely the underlying feelings will be a mixture of all those things, particularly when members have made a heavy emotional investment in the community, as they did in Noah Grey's MASSF community. Seen in this light, the way AOL ended the Netscape forums by pulling the plug without warning was not only disrespectful, but also downright cowardly, cold-hearted and cruel.