Project 4
Analyzing Virtual Communities

Objectives
  • To study a virtual online community

  • To learn how virtual communitites conduct themsleves with the goal of becoming a more knowledgeable and effective member of virtual communities

  • To learn and practice a major tool of academic life--analytical writing
Technological Requirements
  • Word Processor

  • Access to virtual communities such as:
    • usenet newsgroups
    • listservs,listprocs, majordomos
    • electronic bulletin boards
    • Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
    • MUDS/ MOS/ MUSHES
Participants' Prerequesites
  • Intermediate Internet literacy skills including knowledge of:
    • how to find virtual communities
    • how to join virtual communities
    • how to participate in virtual communities
    • how to capture threads (usenet), e-mail messages, and synchronous conference transcripts

Overview

As noted earlier, you will be required to write analytical papers for most of the different subjects you will study at the college level and beyond. In an English literature class, you may write a "literary analysis" in which you had to interpret a poem, short story, or novel. In a science class, you may write an analysis of the chemical reactions during a lab experiment. In a history class, you may write an analysis of the causes of the Vietnam War. In a business class, you may write an analysis of a marketing campaign.

Although each of these assignments asks you to analyze something different and perhaps use different analytical techniques, they all have several features in common. First, in each case you would have an object of analysis. That object might be an actual or tangible "thing" (e.g., a clump of soil or a type of leaf), a visual stimulus (e.g., a painting or a photograph), a language construct (e.g. a poem or a novel), or a phenomenon (e.g., a historical event or a dispute between or among authoritative people or publications). Such analyses would also have common analytical goals of close observation or reading, a breaking of the whole into parts, evaluating similarities and differences among the parts, and analyzing how they work together to make the whole, all with the intent of making sense of the object or phenomena. Finally, these types of analyses also result in some sort of writing. More important, they don't just result in writing, but writing is the vehicle through which the analysis develops.

This project leads you through an analysis of a virtual community. In some ways, the object of analysis, an on-line community bound together through computer-mediated communication, is similar to one of the "Tales of Cyberspace" options in Chapter 8. Once again you will be asked to join a virtual community, but this time instead of telling a story about it, you will be asked to analyze it. Indeed, you may find yourself using some narrative techniques to describe the community, but this time you will be required to break down the whole into parts in an attempt to teach your readers what makes your community unique and how it works. If we can think of description based on your observation as "what" you are studying, an effective analysis will go beyond description to answer the "so what?" question.

The Assignment