"...is devoted
to exploring new forms of social organization and the changing
concepts of community as social groups develop within computer networks.
Contributors examine changes in the nature of personal identity, social
organization and the connections between real-world communities and their
extensions in cyberspace." Table of Contents and abstracts of articles.
Edited by: Marc Smith and Peter Kollock, 1997.
This Web site
is a compilation of references, links, and publications
related to a variety of networked information infrastructures ... such
as community oriented information networks (e.g., Community Networks,
Free-nets, Civic Networks, and so forth). --Paul M.A. Baker
Anne Beamish's
thesis "looks at different types of community
networks and examines how well they meet
their goals. It finds that in spite of the
rhetoric to increase a sense of community
and democratic participation, most community
networks offer limited opportunity for public
debate and discussion."
My focus is
on the graphical virtual worlds that
have recently been released º
worlds that have added a 2-D or 3-D visual representation of a space
to go along with the more traditional text communication that occurs
in such systems as MUDs or IRC. I speak as a sociologist who specializes
in the study of cooperation, exchange, and collective action in communities,
both online and face-to-face." --Peter Kollock
"Electropolis:
Communication and Community on
Internet Relay Chat" her Honours Thesis
on IRC (1991) and "Cultural Formations
in Text-Based Virtual Realities"
Masters Thesis on MUDs (1994). Links to other papers from her Curriculum
Vitae
"Wired Women:
Gender and New Realities
in Cyberspace" - "The MUD Register: Conversational
Modes of Action in a Text-Based
Virtual Reality" - "The Modal Complexity
of Speech Events in a Social
Mud" - "Gender Differences in Text-Based
Virtual Reality" - "'Objectifying'
the Body in the Discourse
of an Object-Oriented MUD" - "The
Situated Behavior of MUD
Back Channels"
...a professional
community for media
researchers. It is a place to come meet colleagues in media studies and
related fields and brainstorm, to hold colloquia and conferences, to
explore the serious side of this new medium. MediaMOO is a research project
of Amy Bruckman of the Epistemology and Learning Group at the The MIT
Media Lab.
Peter Kollock
and Marc Smith
U.C.L.A., Jan. 1994. "...there is a double edge to
computer-mediated
interaction: many of its central qualities make it easier both to cooperate
and to behave selfishly. Thus, computer-mediated interaction raises political,
practical, and sociological problems in new ways and with new stakes. "
"Using Netscan
each newsgroup or collection of newsgroups in the Usenet can be studied
in terms of its rates of activity, internal structure, characteristic
pattern of interaction and structure of internal sub-groups and cliques.
In addition, the interrelationships between newsgroups created for
example through crossposting and sharing the same participants can be
mapped and visualized. "
"Like others
who fell into the WELL, I soon discovered that I was audience, performer,
and scriptwriter, along with my companions, in an ongoing improvisation.
A full-scale subculture was growing on the other side of my telephone
jack, and they invited me to help create something new."
By Jan Fernback
& Brad Thompson - A version of this paper, entitled "Computer-Mediated
Communication and the American Collectivity: The Dimensions of Community
Within Cyberspace," was presented at the annual convention of the
International Communication Association, Albuquerque, New Mexico, May
1995
