ACTIVITY 9.1
Finding a Community to Join

At this point in the course, you may already have been a member of several virtual communities. If you wrote a tale of cyberspace about a CMC community, you've already gotten some insight into how these communities work. If you have now become comfortable with E-mail, IRC, Usenet newsgroups, or other CMC applications, you may have joined other communities, even if only to exchange E-mail regularly with friends across campus and across the country. And if your class has enjoyed the technological ability to create a virtual community of its own through CMC and the World Wide Web, you are now a member not only of a learning community that meets face to face a couple of hours a week but also one that includes a virtual element. So you already have places to begin. Also, you will probably want to revisit activity 8.2, option 2, in Chapter 8 and Chapters 2, 3, and 5 for reminders on how to find potential virtual communities for this project. The following options and steps might also help you discover virtual communities to join.

Option 1: Oral Collaboration

Whether or not your whole class is on-line during class meetings, most of you at this point in the course have visited and joined various communities. Some might have been busy, highly interesting places; others might have been so quiet that there wasn't much to observe; and others, though the members contributed lots of messages, might have been deadly boring. With this option, you might gather as a large group and have a face-to-face discussion built around the questions in step 1. If your community does choose this option, you might consider writing up in advance your responses to the questions in step 1 and making enough copies for everyone in class. If you decide not to share written responses, everyone else in class will need to remember to take notes during the conversation that results from step 2.

Option 2: On-Line Collaboration

If at this point in the semester your class has gone on-line by way of a special newsgroup, listserv, MOO room, or some other sort of CMC application, you may want to exchange ideas on potential communities to join. Again, if you choose this option, structure your on-line conversation on the issues in step 2.

Step 1: Reflecting on Virtual Communities You've Visited

Regardless of what option your class uses to share previous experiences with virtual communities, you can still explore those experiences through writing. Doing so will help you think more deeply about where you've been and also help you prepare your contributions to the sharing discussion in step 2. Launch your word processor, start a new file, and respond to the following items:

What CMC-based communities have you already visited? Don't forget, if your class uses CMC among yourselves, your class would qualify as a virtual community.

What memorable experiences did you have?

What were the worst aspects of joining that community?

What do you remember about your reactions to joining the community? Was it exciting? Scary and intimidating? Boring? Intensive and time consuming?

What do you remember learning about the people, the way they communicated, how you learned about CMC, what you learned about the topics discussed on-line?

The virtual community you visited was supported by one type of CMC system such as E-mail. Are there any other types of CMC communities you've heard about but haven't yet tried out? For example, while you explored an E-mail list, perhaps one of your classmates visited an Internet Relay Chat channel. Have you become curious enough to try out one of the other types of communities you've read or heard about from your peers in this class?

Have you kept up with the community? If so, you must know much more about it now than you did when you first joined. Do you think the same community would serve as a good site to study for this project? If you haven't kept up with it, would you consider joining it again to learn more about it?

Step 2: Sharing Previous Experiences with Virtual Communities

While writing "Tales of Cyberspace" many of you explored different virtual communities supported by different types of CMC systems and concerning different topics. Share with your classmates, orally or on-line depending on which of the options your community chose, the following information:

What virtual communities have you visited in the past? Be sure you include:

• the CMC system (i.e., Usenet newsgroup, IRC, MOO, listserv, listproc, majordomo)
• the access information for the community (i.e. the newsgroup name, the exact IRC channel, the Telnet address for the MOO, the listserv address, etc.).

How would you describe the ones you've visited? What was (were) the major topic(s) of discussion? What was the theme of the virtual community? Were there a lot or only a few messages? Were the threads, strands, and conversations lively, interesting, boring?

How did you find out about the(se) community(ies)? Were they recommended to you by a friend? Did you stumble upon them randomly? Did you "search" for them using techniques described in this book or other on-line sources?

Would you recommend any to a friend? Why?

Knowing what you know about this project at this point, can you think of any communities you've joined that you think would lend themselves to a fruitful discourse analysis?

Step 3: Making Sense of Sharing Experiences about Virtual Communities

OK, now you've heard or read about other's experiences with on-line communities. Consider the following items as a guide to help you think about communities you might join:

Which of the virtual communities you heard about from your classmates did you find most interesting? Are they ones you would consider joining and studying?

What questions do you still have about the communities that interest you most? For example, you might have questions about the amount of traffic, how to find and join the communities, what software to use to gain access to them, and so on. If your sharing was conducted face to face, ask the person who shared the community with you. If your class's sharing was conducted on line, send an E-mail message with your questions.

Step 4: Deciding on a Community to Join

By following the previous steps, you have made a thorough investigation of communities you might join to analyze. Now you need to decide on one. Here are criteria for choosing a virtual community:

Choose one in which you have an interest. Your interest could be in the topic or theme of the group, the kinds of people who participate there, or the type of CMC used. Because you will be studying this group, you want to make sure you follow your interests and curiosity.

Choose one you've visited before (if possible). If you wrote about a CMC community in "Tales of Cyberspace" and that community was an active and interesting one, you might consider continuing your participation in that one. If you've been hanging around there for a while, you probably have a better idea of how it works than you would if you had to join one cold. You might, too, already have saved E-mail messages and transcripts from your earlier visits, so you'd have a good start on the data collection. Of course, if you were never really interested or if you lost interest in that community, there is no need to join it again.

Choose one with a considerable amount of traffic. If you choose a community with relatively low volume of messages or participants (e.g., a listserv on which only three participants send messages every other day or a MOO room where only a couple of people meet during the times you can join), you probably won't be able to collect enough data to write an in-depth analysis. On the other hand, if you join an extremely busy community, you may find yourself flooded with data. Erring on the side of too much data is preferable, however.

Choose one with collectable data. Some types of CMC communities better lend themselves to data capture. If you belong to a listserv, for example, you can create a folder in your E-mail program to store all the messages you receive as a member of that community. IRC discussions, however, can be more difficult to capture, depending on the client software you are using to participate in the channel. Before you commit to a particular community, you will want to determine what kind of software you'll be able to use and how well that software allows you to save transcripts of discussions.