What sort of communities and cultures are emerging?

This new set of social and cultural practices represents a shift in language and understanding. What new literacies are forming? Is this kind of writing more social and collaborative than other kinds? How can web readers manage the huge glut of information? Are there too many writers - will anyone ever read your blog?

I find it interesting to compare the blogging communities with other kinds of communities that are based around bulletin boards and mailing lists. A recent article analysed the ‘Dynamics of a Blogosphere Story’. (The original story has disappeared already. You can follow the buzz around it at Popdex.)

They found that the ‘highly interlinked’ nature of the information depended on four kinds of posting:

lengthy opinion and moulding of a topic
‘vote post’ (an opinion reflecting on another blogger's opinion)
reaction post (responding to a single post on another site), and
‘summation post’ (updating the progress of the overall story across the community).

Plastic Bag followed this up by comparing the distributed power of the syndicated network, to the academic tradition of developing theory via distributed journal writing. Only now, the same pattern emerges over hours rather than months.

One writer has claimed that the blogosphere has become the ‘sixth estate’, an ‘emerging world power that takes it place alongside other political powers’. Could a network develop such global influence? What a claim! Or would that be hype?

Building communities - blog vs. bulletin board?

The bulletin board provides a focus for a group with something in common - a place where people can share ideas and information, in threaded discussion. A mailing list is also a kind of place - it has an address, and the same people are usually there. Somebody posts a query, and other people respond.

When people join in the discussion, they find out the social conventions of the group, and often tailor their comments to the expected subject matter, length, manner and tone of voice. Often there will be an established 'protocol'.

Sometimes, as in physical community life, people don’t bother to find out the conventions first. It’s like learning a language, some find it harder than others. Some feel constrained by protocol, and want to break free.

You might find a stridently individual person dominating the conversation, claiming they just want people to be ‘up front’ about everything, and finding social conventions a restricting factor on their expression. This person might be the sort who believes that free speech means speaking your mind at every opportunity in the most inflammatory way.

This individual can end up in conflict with the group - there may be flaming wars. The individual may either drive others away, or be removed by a moderator.

Here’s an idea, maybe this conflict is aggravated by a lack of self-presence in text-based spaces. Can you really remember exactly who made which comment, in that last discussion-board interaction? We have a tendency to lose ourselves in such voiceless, body-free zones.

Blogging communities emerge from individual sites

Blogging communities on the other hand, are developed around strong individual contributions. Individuals create a strong impression of themselves, which is public, open and archived. Blog sites are constructed in heavily individualised ways - focussing on the individual perspective of the web world out there, using templates with personal aesthetic. Certainly there will be a strong sense of an individual personality in the writing itself.

Discussion may seem to be primarily one-way, with added visitor feedback. However, rather than emerging on a single site, discussion in a blogging community emerges from interaction between multiple sites. Each individual can use syndication methods to link to each others’ sites and headlines, making it easy to visit each other, comment on each others’ comments, and create a ‘multiple-pathway’ type of group conversation.

If you’re not a blogger, though, are you left on the outer?

Reality - merging individuals with community

At the moment you have millions of people accessing thousands of communal sites - such as slashdot.org, Australian flexible learning community (AFLC), mozilla.org, merlot.org, LearningTimes and so forth. More and more, anyone who participates in an online community will have constructed their own public profile somewhere - either within a corporate system such as Janisons (eg AFLC), LearningTimes, or mc2[at]vicnet - or within his/her own web space.

Because people are building strong, dynamic and evolving public profiles, their ‘weight’ in the communities also becomes much stronger. They have their own public soapbox to fall back on, where individual rantings are expected, and maybe can tone down the invective in shared areas.

Many bloggers also publish their contact details via several communities, via instant messenger system and relay chat channels. The channels of communication keep on expanding. No wonder there’s big money in telecommunications!

So now, discussion takes place not only in the public venues, and the individual sites, but also in the corridors and linkages between them.