Newsgroups and E-Mail Lists

Newsgroups, E-Mail Lists, and Community?

Millions of people use these tools to build or access online social spaces that host conversations and the exchange of various digital objects related to a huge variety of human interests. These tools enable large numbers of participants to coalesce around a common interest at low cost. Conversational social cyberspaces host a wide range of activities and are used to realize diverse ends. From current events to obscure hobbies, from the trivial to the consequential, social cyberspaces are repositories of the collective artifacts of computer-mediated collective interaction. In many cases the contributions of a small number of active participants in these spaces benefit a much larger audience. By answering questions, connecting trading partners, and directing people toward appropriate resources, participants can often collectively provide one another with mutual support, services, markets, and goods.

This promise is not uniformly realized. Both e-mail lists and newsgroups host ongoing interactions that are sometimes labeled virtual communities. Some do become the site of durable, rich, and complex relationships interlinking large numbers of individuals. Whether such interaction qualifies as community is debatable; certainly not all, or even most, conversational social cyberspaces are paragons of community, and many devolve into abandoned and desolate spaces littered with advertisements. Words such as community and even group may be misleading when applied broadly to online spaces. The term group is widely used to describe tools for supporting online conversations (consider names of online systems such as Google [Page 998]Groups, eGroups (which became Yahoo Groups), MSN Groups, and, of course, newsgroups. The term group suggests a relatively small, stable, well-bounded, and cohesive collection of people, a definition that poorly describes the populations of most online spaces.

Groups and communities no doubt do exist in some social cyberspaces, but an architectural perspective may provide a clearer metaphor for considering the kinds of social associations that are present in networked environments. Like the variation in social life found in physical buildings, from bus stations to legislatures, online environments are places where people can gather and form many different kinds of relationships. Therefore, asking whether these spaces host associations that qualify as communities may be less useful than empirically exploring just what the patterns of activity and structure found in these spaces really are. With a few people doing the bulk of the active contribution, the distribution of activity among the populations found in e-mail lists and newsgroups is as highly skewed as that found in many voluntary associations or clubs.

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