And, a little emo from Amylea

Kate's playing the new RadioHead CD, and the songs are making me a bit lethargic, nostalgic, acerbic, and other -ics. And I've been thinking about how much I hate December and Christmas and family-ness for obvious reasons, and this emerged. Needs some work...too much in the confessional mode, and that's so 1980s. So, not for publication or anything, but I wanted to save it here.

five years ago
curled up on my mothers couch in a week long sigh of relief
time pouring out of me
unafraid and steady, sure wheels settled firmly in the driveway
I breathed in the world with out a mask, hope coating my skin
The creak of the floorboards as she padded back and forth
her cough punching through the cold air
the soapy noises from the kitchen
lulled me into satisfied sleep

ten days without my sisters as ten too many
their absence the only disturbance to my slumber
all night lights dancing blue across my too-firm bed
the bed I only visited, never really laid in
the sheets she dug out of the closet
the kitchen table I still thought of as his not ours
--the soft edges of nowhere cocooned me
and I needed not a home
stately mansions and even-sided shelves
roots and leaves mixed in a compost mash

what first snapped my shoulders into rigid lines?
where is the hope of the city at night?
of patterns broken, sunlight always fading,
music always playing in the musty subway air?
Do not ask me to prepare for this
as eternal weights and concreted place
a permanent address suspended in the middle of nowhere
I've washed the hope from beneath my nails
and refused to let peace enter this door
and I will not rest till rest is restored.

Amylea's Daemon

"A Pirate's Life For Me": Narrative Theory and Online Fan Community

[Note 12/20/07: The final version of this paper will not be published here for various reasons--mainly because it sucked and I don't feel I'm saying anything we don't already know, either as fans or as scholars, that isn't expressed by the outline here. If you'd like to read the full version, email me for an electronic copy.]

Intro--the day fandom exploded. The event known as "Strikethrough07" can show us how narrative theories might be adapted to examine communal, asynchronous narratives online.

1. Narrative theory as appropriate for studying fan culture and fan text production. Bormann's Symbolic Convergence as a place to start. Fisher (and his respondants), particularly talking about the communal nature of all narrative. Ricoeur on temporality and (re)iteration. In literature: Peter Brooks (Formalism/Structuralism)--justify use of literature by pointing to a lack of other ways to analyze written communication that is neither literature nor tech writing.



2. Fandom--definitions (including overview of LiveJournal as platform), narrative nature of, and counter-hegemonic practices of. Citing Henry Jenkins, Matt Hills, and Camille Bacon-Smith's ethnographic studies of fandom.
   


3. : Strikethrough07 as told "objectively" by news organizations and technology news blogs.
   


4. The narratives of Strikethrough 07. Examples throughout.
   
   
   1. Creating leaders, heroes and villans--this was the first task: "Whose fault is this?" was the first thing most fans asked and began researching.
   
   
   2. Time passage/speed of mythos construction. A single narrative emerged as the dominant version more quickly due to hyperlinking and copy/paste abilities.
   
   
   3. Genre of narratives of Strikethrough is quite clearly that of a detective story. Peter Brooks says this is the most engaging and most basic plot of all--an unveilling, a revelation. Fans constructed their narratives around this most familiar emplottment--because fanfiction is often written like this? Because it is the easiest to write? Because it poses the writer as Revealer?
   
   
   4. Pirates as metaphor. Fans see fandom as a whole by unifying under the pirate metaphor. They also see themselves as counter cultural (and thus heroic). They also identify with one of the major fandoms at that time: Pirates of the Carribbean, drawing on the newly released movie for inspiration, working issues of capitalism, economic dominance and hegemony into their fanfictions (which are usually just about romance).
   
   
   5. Errors and Rumors. As fans retell stories of their Strikethrough experience and attempt to hash out exactly what happened, accusations are made, unfounded rumors told, mistakes get made. The concessions to these errors are minimal, with most fans saying that the details actually *don't* matter--just the sentiment behind the actions. Which is strange, given the point above.
      


5. Contributions to narrative theory
   1. Concession: The particularities of fandom must be considered: Already a strong community, already based in narrative.
   
   
   2. Burke's symbolic action actually worked: By symbolically "flaming" the organization causing grievances (LiveJournal) fans managed to change policy in their favor.
   
   
   3. Strikethrough as example of conflict resolution through narrative actually creating a communal identity from disparate sects (Harry Potter fans met with Sailor Moon fans, Smallville fans met with Pirates of the Carribean fans).
   
   
   4. Strikethrough as catharsis.
   
   
   5. Introduction of desire to catalogue and historicize events through posting narratives online.
   
   
   6. Fans are used to open-ended narratives, to filling in the gaps, so it's no surprise many of the narratives simply stop around the first week of September. References still abound, but the fanaticism has faded. What can this tell us about other community narratives and their longevity?
   
   
   7. The genre choice is interesting, as fans are continuously engaged in "revealing" the subtext of their favorite texts. This could be one of the differences between spoken narratives traded among face-to-face community members informally, and the more formal task of writing a narrative that others will voluntarily *find* then *read*--there must be some suspense built, the craftedness of the story is more important without other social cues.
   
   
   8. Visual narrative-- narratives online are permanent (unless LiveJournal deletes them). Not only are these permanent, but online interaction involves a visual component that may have been traditionally filled with gestural language. Unlike f2f communication, however, narratives online are hierarchically arranged by time: threads of a conversation appear as replies *below* the original comment, and subsequent comments on the same "level" of reply are indented the same amount.
      

Conclusion: Proposals for further study
Strikethrough was just one example, focusing on fandom. But online communities exist outside of fandom, and create narratives as a way of creating identity (Cite Howard Rheingold and Nancy Baym). Anecdotes are the main genre of online communication, but how many of these are narratives that actually help build community? Is there any way to predict which narratives will hold in a community, and which will be just another post?
Structuralism can tell us a lot about the types that survive: Those with strong senses of heroes and villans, those that feature a quest for information (which makes sense, given the medium of the Internet is traditionally used for information-seeking). Further studies might look at how often comments on narratives are themselves narratives, how many times a given narrative is linked to by multiple users.
Continued work on three-d avatars has revealed software engineer's attempts to duplicate f2f communication--how are narratives currently created in 3-d avatar environments, and to what extent do these look like "real" narratives, and to what extent do they seem more like bulletin board posts?

COM632: White Paper

Creating and Maintaining Online Communities Through Rhetorical Thinking

AmyLea Clemons

Submitted on 27 November 2007 to the On-line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2007, Purdue University,
Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog

Creating successful and vibrant online communities has been the subject of much debate: How much control should the founder have? Who should moderate and mediate for the community, if anyone? What design plans best encourage development of and participation in communities? How do we ensure the community will operate as planned? Although the ideal answer to any of these questions is “It depends,” this paper examines the best practices any community founder should follow and the processes he or she should consider at each step of community creation. The essay concludes with a discussion of Lloyd Bitzer’s “The Rhetorical Situation” as a quick and easy schema that online developers can use to simply the process.

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Although the dotcom burst has leveled the enthusiasm for the internet somewhat, online communities—that is, a group of users who post to and create a central web space—still present as viable and vibrant spaces for growth. Creating successful and vibrant online communities, however, has been the subject of much debate: How much control should the founder have? Who should moderate and mediate for the community, if anyone? What design plans best encourage development of and participation in communities? How do we ensure the community will operate as planned? Although the ideal answer to any of these questions is “It depends,” this paper examines the best practices any community founder should follow and the processes he or she should consider at each step of community development.

Definitions and exclusions

“Online community” can mean several different things. Although we are now long beyond the debate over whether or not communities can exist online, what exactly these communities do or how they relate to their real world counterparts is still in discussion. Online communities differ from face-to-face communities in several ways, but also share significant overlap. Jenny Preece (2000) divides online communities into four components: People interacting “socially;” a “shared purpose;” policies; and computer systems (p. 7). These four components help identify an online group as a “community” and can serve as areas of analysis for developers.

Although all online communities may share these four components, the “shared purposes” can vary greatly. In a 2004 study of twenty seven bulletin boards (BBS) communities Ridings and Gefen found that use of online communities is not just limited to information-seeking, but that “virtual communities, like real ones, are joined not only because of utilitarian information exchange, but also because they serve the social need of having a friend and getting social support.” It is clear that some online communities are skewed toward information exchange or social support, and that the design, development and implementation of any online community will depend heavily upon the goals and activities the developer expects to occur.

This essay will be limited to discussing online communities that mainly foster social interaction instead of information gathering; of course, information distribution can be expected within these communities as well, as per Ridings and Gefen’s study, but the communities and processes described in this discussion will focus on groups that emphasize interaction over information, eliminating communities involved in e-commerce, journalistic blogging, and social bookmarking. In the following discussion, then, “online community” will refer to community blogging platforms, support networks, and social networking communities such as Facebook.

Further, it should be noted that, as with “real” or face-to-face communities, no community is prototypical. Preece (2000) reminds us that “Each community is unique, and there is no guaranteed recipe for a successful community” (p. 7). She also provides a helpful metaphor for developers to consider:

“Communities develop and continuously evolve. Only the software that supports them is designed. Thus, the role of a community developer is analogous to that of the mayor of a new town, who works with town planners to set up suitable housing, roads, public buildings, and parks, and with governors and lawyers to determine local policies” (p. 26).

It is with this metaphor in mind that best practices for online communities are proposed for each of the following areas: Planning, Designing, Implementing, and Evaluating.

Planning

When planning an online community, developers should be prepared to conduct research in at least two areas. First and foremost, the community should have a clear, central focus. Because online communities do not have a physical locale to ground them, they must be grounded in other ways, particularly in a common goal. Users report participating in online communities for several reasons, especially for discussing a shared interest. (Ridings & Gefen, 2004). Thus, developers should engage in initial studies to determine possible user interest and the specific direction of that interest. A community for sufferers of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, for example, would not only be interested in sharing their experiences, but might be specifically interested in sharing coping tips, trading doctor names, and linking to unique treatment options. More importantly, developers should recognize whether the “interest” is strong enough to translate into “participation.” The purpose must be strong enough to incite action among regular users and lurkers alike.

A secondary research area is related to the first: audience analysis is essential to determining the direction of an online community. No online community is created in a vacuum; a profile of potential users can tell developers much about the probable direction of the community. While there are many approaches to audience analysis, Baym provides a simple and effective schema. Baym (1998) lists four categories for consideration: external contexts, temporal structure, system infrastructure, and participant characteristics. Of these, the external context of the participants and the participant characteristics should be the main focus for developers at the planning stage. In determining the context and characteristics of potential users, researchers should ask several questions: What demographic would this community serve? What do we know about their access to and familiarity with computer mediated communication? What constraints might there be on the users’ abilities to participate? What environmental conditions might actually encourage participation by our target audience? These questions are essential to address before the community is made “live,” so that designers can use the tools available to them to encourage participation in specific ways. For example, while Chronic Fatigue patients may be interested in such a community, the conditions of the illness itself will prevent many from participation; developers should note such constraints and determine if they will effect the initial building process.

As they prepare such research, developers should note that “participation” comes in many forms. “Lurkers,” or users who read the exchanges of other members of an online community without contributing to the community themselves, must be considered as part of the community, despite their invisibility. Ridings and Gefen assert that “arguably lurkers are members, albeit silent ones, in virtual communities” and that they

“should be of interest to companies and to researchers. Moreover, lurkers must actively navigate to the URL and occasionally even login to this type of a virtual community to obtain access to it. In doing so, even a lurker becomes an active, albeit silent, participant” (Ridings and Gefen, 2004).

Developers must keep lurkers in mind when planning a community: because research suggests a large percentage of “users” of online communities are actually lurking, a community should be built to accommodate lurkers without pressuring these users to give up their anonymity or to invest more time or emotion that they are willing to. When considering potential uses, developers must assume lurking will occur, and should design accordingly.

In summary, community developers must begin with a strong purpose and sense of audience before beginning design of software and web spaces. Once interest and audience have been established, developers can move on to the more difficult task of creating a style, a signature, a theme, and a “presence” for their community.

Designing

Online communities have sprung up across the web in such vast numbers that the introduction of a new community will not necessarily register to most users. Therefore a new community must not only be easy to use in order to encourage participants in the early stages of the community’s development, but it must also stand out visually and conceptually.

The best designs are “intuitive,” as Krug says in his 2005 book Don’t Make Me Think! “Intuitive” in this case, refers to ease of navigation; users must be able to sort through the layers of the site in order to find specific areas of interest. For this reason, the front or “home” page requires the most consideration. One option that many businesses and nonprofit online communities alike now use is a “splash” page, which provides easy entry to the subsequent pages for both regular and first time users. Splash pages include simplified instructions, large graphics for site navigation, and prominent login boxes. Splash pages limit the number of options a user may take to enter and move through the site, which thus limits the overwhelmed feeling many first time users get and prevents regular users from wading through unnecessary material. Splash pages must be visually interesting without looking “busy” however; Krug (2005) finds that many sites, in an attempt to catch the user’s eye, are instead distracting and confusing, causing readers to abandon their search.

From an introductory page, such as a splash page or a more traditional “home” page, each major activity developers expect to occur on the site must be accessible and easy to locate. For example, a community for single fathers might focus mainly on forum or bulletin board postings, and these forums should be accessible from the home page. Other activities on the same “level” as participating in the forums (such as uploading photos, linking to news articles, making important site-wide announcements) should also be accessible from this page, and each page on the same level should carry the same basic design. Maintaining a “theme”—a page template that keeps color, pattern, navigation and language uniform across several pages—not only makes the site easier to navigate, but creates a sense of location in “real” space; recurring design motifs help to stabilize an otherwise ephemeral “cyberspace,” and these motifs give the site a visual identity users can connect with on a sensory level.

Above all, design should aim for ease of use, because when a site is easy to navigate and post to, users will be more likely to participate. For the best interaction, posts to the online community should be made using the simplest software available—no user should have to learn special coding (unless they want to) in order to participate. Wiki softwares that allow users to simply add content without “uploading” are best, although any software (such as WordPress) that uses a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor that works like a word processing program should suffice.

Using software that allows users to post without learning extra codes should ease some of the posting anxiety that might prevent lurkers from participation. Another way to encourage lurkers to become more visible is to create levels of participation. Many sites now track the number of readers each post receives, which can serve to highlight the presence of lurkers, even if they choose not to “speak.” Yet another option is to require users to log in to read and comment on some posts; LiveJournal requires users to create an account to read material that posting members select as “private.” By requiring log in, developers can better track who logs in when, and how often.

The best designs are not only easy to use, but attempt to make the community feel “real” to users; this can be accomplished both visually and via the software’s functionality. Visually, the site’s various sub-pages should be unified by a common theme, as described above. By maintaining consitency among pages, developers create a sense of static, permanent space, as “real” communities tend to occur in a single physical place. Structurally, the software platform should support this sense of community by creating other visual cues for the users. Because computer mediated communication tends to filter out the social cues we are used to experiencing in a “real” community, an online community may be made to feel more “real” by adding back in cues that allow users to identify themselves in whole or in part, as with a picture of themselves, or simply adding their real names (Walther & Parks 2002).A prominent “Who’s Online” function in the navigation or side bars can show visitors and registered users alike the names of users currently occupying the site; this function emphasizes a shared space and shared time, and encourages users to connect to each other—they know they are not alone in the cyberspace of the community. Other functions that should be considered include

• Large, easily visible “Comment” buttons on each user posting so that threaded conversations can begin in the space they are begun.


• Time stamps on each comment that allow users to more easily imagine the person on the other end of the conversation.


• “Tags” for each conversation. Tags are key words that users categorize their posts with. Lists of tags on the main page allow people to see what’s being discussed most frequently, and links them to users discussing similar topics.

These simple functions should be incorporated into the site design when available. The prominence of each feature depends upon the purpose and function developers want to foster in a given community, and these decisions should be made early in the design process.

One final feature that communities working with a younger demographic should consider is the use of avatars. Avatars are graphical representations of the user—small images attached to each user’s post and profile that can be changed easily depending on the user’s mood, the post topic, or the community’s focus. Older users may not feel comfortable with these images, or may not have the technical ability to create them as easily as younger generations do.

Once the design has been set, the community _site_ is ready to “go live”—to be made public to the internet in general. As the community begins building, developers should begin considering key questions of implementation and evaluation.

Implementing
How to manage and implement online communities continues to be a hotly debated subject. Some argue for a central moderating figure (usually connected to the supporting organization), while others find that moderation is best done “organically,” by users themselves. Nearly all, however, agree that some type of moderation is necessary, and moderation begins with setting initial guidelines and rules for all users to follow.

Guidelines or rules should be set early on, but should always be open for reconsideration. In particular, developers should consider the following issues before beginning:

Politeness to other users. “Flaming,” or harrassing or abusive comments between users on a given thread or topic, should be kept to a minimum. Politeness online also includes restrictions against profanity or overly graphic descriptions. The level of “adult” language allowed is contingent upon the goals and audience of the community.

• Length of posts. Overly lengthly posts can clutter a site, and often makes other users feel croweded or silenced. Krug (2005) states that “We don’t read pages, we scan them,” and that “if the document is longer than a few paragraphs, we’re likely to print it out because it’s easier and faster to read on paper than on a screen” (p. 22). Most software platforms provide a “cut” or “more” function that trims posts to a more readable length for the front page, but a maximum post length should be set to keep the design looking even.


• Off-topic posts. While the occasional non-related post can lighten the mood or break the monotony of a group, too many off-topic posts can detract from the original goals and purpose of the community. Limiting off topic posts can also limit spamming and advertising.

Once the rules have been tentatively set, developers should post them high in the hierarchy. To ensure users at least know about the rules, the guidelines should be presented as part of the registration process. Many sites now require users to agree to a “Terms of Use” contract before joining communities as registered users; these contracts list the rules and any other legal information, such as copyright laws. In general, rules are not only a good legal reference (for extreme cases of abuse), but gives users a shared responsibility that, again, builds a sense of “real” community.

Legislation of the rules should be carefully considered. Again, the use of a moderator is necessary for almost any site, but the type of moderator and the process of moderating varies. :Developers must first decide between a moderator chosen by the administrators and a moderator that arises “naturally” from the users themselves. Once a moderator (or moderators) is selected, the particular role this moderator would play must be outlined. Questions to consider include

• What “punishments” are appropriate for rule breakers? Will moderators have the power to remove users or deny them access?


• How will users be alerted of offenders and offenses? Some sites issue mass emails, others send separate notes to each offender for each offense.


• How will rules be enforced? Some communities periodically post site-wide reminders, others assume users will conform without reminders.

One of the touted benefits of online communities is the tendency of such communities to be more friendly to those who are less socially adept or who are marginalized by the dominant society. These utopian notions are likely naïve, but the presence of rules and guidelines should not detract from the sense of “communitas”–an almost magical sense of communion that moves “toward universalism and openness” (“Rites”). Finding balance between regulation and chaos may emerge “organically” from the users themselves, but developers should be prepared to step in when necessary.

Evaluating
The key questions a developer should ask once a community has been active for several weeks are “Is it working?” and “What can we do better?” Evaluating an online community’s success can be difficult, as markers of success can sometimes be less thank obvious. Although success can be measured in many ways, the easiest aspect to measure is volume; although there is much more to a successful community than the number of users and posts alone, these can be good places to begin evaluation. In particular, developers should address:

• 
  Number of users, both registered and lurkers, if possible.


• Number of hits.


• Timeline of hits: When are people logging on? What are peak hours? Is there a particular time of month? Is the timeline related to any site changes or administration changes?

For those that find a community failing to meet expected volumes, new strategies of finding and motivating users should be implemented. To advertise the community, developers should locate sites focusing on similar issues in order to promote their own sites. For communities related to a profession or trade, developers might consider advertise in the journals or magazines that serve those trades. To ensure users can find the site easily, web managers should ensure that search engines such as Google can find the community.

Other enticements can increase participation. An empty community is rarely inviting; developers should make the space look occupied; founders can begin threads in forums or post questions to invite conversation. Some sites benefit from “guest bloggers” well known among the potential community members. Any post from a new community member should be promptly and encouragingly commented upon by founders and developers.

Ultimately, even well-populated communities may require evaulation and revision if users find the site design and software structure difficult to use. Periodic informal usability testing can help designers improve the functionality of the site with little cost to the developers; brief surveys every few months can keep designers and developers abreast of any emergent problems as the community changes and grows.

The Rhetorical Situation: A shorthand guide to community development

The above suggestions and points for consideration detail possibilities for online community development. However, many of these decisions are contingent and based in the specific situational context. When considering each of the above possibilities, developers should keep in mind what is commonly called the “rhetorical situation,” a “complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence” (p. 6). Bitzer offers three points to consider when attempting to define the rhetorical situation: Audience, exigency, and Constraints (p. 6). Others have added to the list, adding a “Context” category to further define historico-political elements; extrapolating the “Audience” seciton to include gender, race, and class issues; and adding to “Constraints” to discuss means of production. Taken as just Bitzer’s original schema, however, “the rhetorical situation” offers a framework for analyzing any situation in which texts are produced.

Online communities, as text-based constructions, are rhetorical situations as defined by Bitzer. Each of the previous sections–planning, design, implementation, and evaluatoin–can benefit from an analysis of the rhetorical situation at each stage. Because each community is different, each rhetorical stuation is different, and by detailing the situation, developers can better tailor the above suggestions to their own community. Additionally, a rhetorical analysis prevents developers from developing hard and fast rules that can stagnate a community. Thinking rhetorically can also highlight room for potential change and growth; in analyzing constraints, developers can find ways to remove barriers or exploit an absense of limitations. Thinking rhetorically also helps developers to determine the best way to moderate communities; remembering the users are also humans who interact textually can prevent clashes and promote good relations between moderators and users.

Many of the points for consideration above should be read through the rhetorical situation. The particular rhetoricity of online communities seems to call for extra attention to the community’s textual practices (both verbal and visual). While it make take a little more work for developers to learn rhetorical language and theories, adding a rhetorical perspective to the above will doubtlessly promote growth and vibrancy in the community.

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References
Baym, N. (1998). The emergence of on-line community. In S. Jones (Ed.), Cybersociety 2.0 (pp. 35-68). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Bitzer, Lloyd (1968). The rhetorical situation. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 1 (1), 1-14.
Krug, Steve (2005). Don’t make me think! Berkeley, Calif: New Riders Press.
Preece, Jenny (2000). Online communities. Chichester, England: Wiley and Sons.
Ridings, C. & Gefen, D. (2004). Virtual Community Attraction: Why People Hang Out Online. JCMC 10(1), article 4.
Rites of Communitas (2004). The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Religious Rites, Rituals and Festivals. (pp. 97-101) Ed. Frank A. Salamone. New York: Routledge.
Walther, J. B., & Parks, M. R. (2002). Cues filtered out, cues filtered in: Computer-mediated communication and relationships. In M. L. Knapp & J. A. Daly (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (3rd ed., pp. 529-563). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Strikethrough07: Paper Plan

1. What are you trying to work out? What is the central problem?

How are narratives constructed communally online? How are stories constructed across several communities?

2. What is the significance of your study?

Narrative theory tends to focus on synchronic face to face communitcation. This study will use one example to suggest how similar processes appear in asynchronous mediated communication.
3. What is the scope of your study?

What are you including/excluding? Justify it!

This study focuses on one event in a large community online--"fandom" as a whole, which is rarely considered as a single community. This particular event unified fandoms and allowed fans to see themselves as a group. Why fandom? Because fans are fanatic--and there's a lot to sort through and look at. I am excluding the "other side"--the narrative of the "villains" for time's sake. And the spyware thing.

4. State your research question

What can Strikethrough07 show us about narrative building in online communities?

5. What are your data?

Posts from several communities created specifically to address the event, posts from individuals about the event, LiveJournal's press releases, transcripts of interviews provided by individual bloggers, and news stories/blogs about the event.
6. What body of theory/ies are you drawing on?
Narrative theory informed by Russian Formalists and Communication scholars

Some thoughts on icons as memes

From an IM conversation with Lou...

Icons are a way of linking the idea of "meme" with "community" online. Icons, on Live Journal and for other online communities (and occasionally IM windows) were originally meant to be images of the user to attach to a community blog-to give a visual, social cue that users could link to the person posting. Over time, icons started skewing away from being representational of the users. Fans started started using screenshots of their favorite characters, they started framing and photoshopping them to fit with their (the community's) attitudes toward the fandom.

Some people excel at making them, so they get together to form a community for posting and sharing their icons. Other people steal or borrow, reference the users, and links are made between journals, between communities, between people.
What's interesting is when you see that icons are supposed to be representation of the user but instead are representations of the attitudes of the community. Icons have let us lose all possible touches iwth the physical body and individual and venture into communal space.

Icons are enthymematic--shorthand for situations and they generate narrative as well as mimetic desire.

Again, though, people wouldn't do this without communities in which to share them: check the old school fandoms of Kirk/Spock. People made the vids and fics for the conventions, for the 'zines, to mail to each other....not for their own enjoyment. And that's not even getting into RPG--a community built around people not being themselves.

Christmas 2003

I'd nearly dreamed of heaven
when the flood began to rise
There's something there of a howling
in the deadening of the skies
It's the song that says just what I hear
That comes as a surprise
The sickened bells of Christmas
toll coldly as snow flies

Notes from Summer 07

Despite what this blog seems to indicate, I DID nearly make it all the way through the Burke corpus this summer. My notes were taken by hand (insert gasps of surprise, shock, and/or awe here)! However, the notebook is getting more and more battered by Kit (and, I suspect, Bastet), and I've had it since Gerald's Contemp Rhet class, so it's probably time to do the right thing and just recycle it. First, of course, I'll save my notes here, and on that ephemeral "server" thing at Purdue. Just in case.

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First, some random poetry....

No date, no title. No Idea.

It's my job to rip out the bricks and reveal the ones hidden in comfort behind. This is Virginia, untouched white walls, that I scream at to unloose. They stare when I reappear and I apologize for my absence. Which way, I ask, which way away from the dust? Which way across the too small ocean, where I died by saying, "I live!" too often in Latin?

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The man with slightly toned thighs sitting in front of me has a wishbone shaped scar running up his arm, over the carpal arteries. Like someone tried to peel them out of him. He can no longer retract his vow, but he does not feel quite at home in resenting that.

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(After reading Burke on "Perspective by Incongruity" and "Piety")
The gargoyles followed me from high school--that first imitation-marble statue that sat still on my vanity does not have a memorable face. It was not grotesque or strange enough, its eyes too small to be of any real transcendence. She gave it to me (In French now: Elle m'a donne) in praise of skills I did not want (Je ne les ai voules pas) to exploit, not in that oak-ridden town (La ville que m'a tuee), the stately marble and brick sinking slowly into the swamp. I left the gargoyle to watch over my mirror instead: only he could make it mean again, apart from the sea foam tiles swimming in my visions.

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(After seeing Joyce Carole Oates read at Purdue)

It's the kitchen, he realizes sometime after dawn, the kitchen floor he's ended up on this time. It's a fact, he said, a quote, he said, that Betrayal is Damning. The spider plant is hardy--thank god, he thinks, palming the knife from the counter. It wasn't sharp enough anyway, so it lands in the dishwasher, rounded point up.

---

Why is it good to leave yourself sop much? TO go so far from your own brain, to be carved out from your own soul? Is it too deep in there, like an old mattress you've sunk your own silhouette in?

---

Random phrases in margins to be incorporated (embodied?) at another time
We must agree with a shiver that One did things for dead men.

The uncrowded filth of an ugly God
grounds us to the flowerless fields

The weave we use for fishing of men is perhaps too tight, too scratchy, too barbed.

The East holds in tension
the hand at the forehead
the groin,
right foot raised to toe.

One eye twitching
as he says
"Runs his eye along it"
not in variable foot
my foot squished into a
fat black shoe.

Transfigured by the broken clock
minutes as degrees of persuasion

So, it's another crit class and again
I'm staring down something Victorian,
and decidedly homosexual. Dorian Gray
is poking his sensual head at me,
cooing, "Remember!"

Usability

Krug, Steve. Don't Make Me Think! Indianapolis, IN: New Riders Publishing, 2000.

"But even then, if the document is longer than a few paragraphs, we're likely to print it out because it's easier and faster to read on paper than on a screen" (22). Ah, the return of the E-Book debate. Book 2.0. What do we do with this, when online communities are only textual (for now?) and text is "noisy"? Krug says "We don't read pages. We scan them," and this is true for the "information" based websites Krug is designing. But what about those websites that don't just disseminate, but create? Is this where the "drabble" and "flashfic" came from? Is it the amount of text as a whole, or the amount of text per section (as in posts to blogs)?

"Happy talk must die" (46) wherein "happy talk" are the introductory welcoming messages that we hate to write, and hate to read. But these are also conventions which he *likes*. Welcome tags are "basically just a way to be sociable" (46)--well, isn't that what we want, for social websites?

On Bookmarking: When we want to return to something on a Web site, instead of relying on a physical sense of where it is we have to remember where it is in teh conceptual hierarchy an retrace our steps. This is one reason why bookmarks--stored personal shortcuts--are so important and why the Back button accounts for somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of all Web clicks.

We should change the Welcome! to a Start Here! tag.

The myth of the Average User:
"The belief that most Web users are like us is enough to produce gridlock in the average Web design meeting. But behind that belief lies another one, even more insidious: the belief that most Web users are like anything" (136).

The Eureka House

Oi! We're live at The Eureka House. Go visit us, and be impressed.

Dr. Matei quote of the day

Today, Dr. Matei compared online communities to sturgeons--because they're "cartiladginous." Like "trying to nail Jello to a wall."
This was only funny because Pam answered, "A fish? Online communities are like a fish?"
And that was only funny because earlier Dr. Matei said that "It's like a dog, sitting on a pile of hay. The goat can't get to it, and the dog won't eat it!"--in relation to "spare data sets that you'll never use." Sometimes his metaphors (meta-phor, substitution) are very Burkeian. After all, I talk about critical trouts....

COM632: Jenny Preece, Online Communities

Preece, Jenny. Online Communities. West Sussex, England: John Wiley and Sons, 2000.

Preece's text is a merger of four perspectives (sociology, technology, virtual worlds, E-commerce) that examines what makes a good online community--how it ticks. The mixed perspective allows her to move easily across disciplinary lines and address the multiple problems online interaction brings us. At times, it can feel like a how-to book (techne), at other times, an intro to online community theory, and still at other times, a discussion space for the discipline (particularly in methodology). Still, it is not a schizophrenic read--in fact, it is an easy read, and I'm afraid I'll miss something subtle. So, the pulled out quotes below will hopefully highlight what I think is important--that which is not already on Dr. Matei's lecture notes.

In many ways, this feels somewhat like a self-help book to me--many good, but abstract ideas, with little concrete information. Yes, good design is essential. Yes, we must find user-oriented design. But what does that mean? And how can she fill a whole book with lists and bullet points of what seems to be fairly obvious? Or am I just so embedded in design culture, in internet culture, in online communities in general, that these only seem obvious to me? Who, exactly is her audience, and what level of expertise do they have?

---

"The collective purpose of a community, the goals and roles of the individuals in a community, and the policies generated to shape social interaction all influence social interaction in the community. Sociability is concerned with these issues" (Intro, p. 7)

"Each community is unique, and there is no guaranteed recipe for a successful community. However, developers can influence the way a community develops by carefully communicating its purpose and policies" (7)

Her definition of "online community" is interesting. Four parts: "People" interacting "socially"; a "shared purpose"; policies; and Computer systems. I think hers is the first to include the technology as part of the definition, rather than comparing online community to social scientific definitions of "real" community. This shows, a the outset, a different way of thinking. However, on p 11, she notes that there is still the problem of absent physical presence, and that good "sociable" design is what helps smooth it over.

See the list on p. 13 and the additional list on p. 14

A note against Utopianist thinking in online community theory discussions: "Yet physical communities do not always function well and to the advantage of all, or even the majority, of their members. So why assume that online communities will do any better? It's easy, but dangerous, to assume that all communities are good" (20).

Preece addresses the "threat" the nonphysical space of cyberspace poses to "real" relationships, to "social capital and society" (22). The "Carnegie Mellon study" seems to raise questions about antisocialism and the internet, about isolation. Preece simply says that we developers must be 'aware' (THERE'S THAT WORD AGAIN) of this potential, and should "raise awareness" (EURGH!) among participants of this tendency. Of course, awareness won't do any good, if you're sitting at home, on your computer 6 days a week, highly aware that you aren't doing any good in the "real" world, but quite happy about it.

Oooh, some PoMo!
"Most definitions treat community only as an entity; in fact, community is a process (Fernback, 1999). Communities develop and continuously evolve. Only the software that supports them is desgined. Thus, the role of a community developer is analogous to that of the mayor of a new town, who works with town planners to set up suitable housing, roads, public buildings, and parks, and with governors and lawyers to determine local policies" (26).

On Health Communities: Yep, I recognize the genre. And I HATE reading the fibro ones.

---

Chapter 5: Research Speaks to Practice: Interpersonal Communication

Oh, it's social science.
"Social Presence Theory"--"addresses how successfully media convey a sense of the participants being physically present, using face-to-face communication as the standard for assessment [yeah, cause that always works]. Social presence depends not only on the words people speak but also on verbal and non verbal cues, body language, and context" (150). See readings from Oct 15 for more. See also: Media Richness Theory.

She assumes that "social presence fundamentally affects how participants sense emotion, intimacy, and immediacy" (151). I'm most interested in immediacy--to be without medium, without barriers between the I and Thou. How platonic these assumptions are! How we fill in social cues online is interesting--they assume we don't, but I'm fairly sure we do. See her notes on "self-disclosure" and self-disclosure reciprocity (154). "Psychologically, the more people discover that they are similar to each other, thus, the more they tend to like each other, thus the more they will disclose about themselves" (154).

"Filtering out social cues impedes normal impression development." NORMAL????? (153).

Oh, gender! And gender bending! She's only scratching the surface of Queering potential online, but I guess that has to do with her audience and purpose. Damn.

Common Ground (156-164).
This section interests me most, as a Burkeian and as a fangirl. The phrase we're going with is "Common Ground Theory" (oh, come on! Get creative!) and it "determines how two people or a small group validate that they understand each other. There must be common referents ("my" or "that" or "now")--synchronicity. Different media allow different ways to ground (invite consubstantiality)

1. Co-presence (physical)


2. Visibility (physical and video)


3. Audibility (physical and audio)


4. Cotemporality (immediacy)


5. Simulatneity (messages can be sent and received instantaneously--experiencing the same thing at the same time--like watching MTV together while chatting).
   Sequentiality (people take turns, establishing time)


6. Reviewability (go back and see what happened, dude! Or edit?)


7. Revisability (wikiality)

Grounding and Empathy
Empathy is most visible between people with similar experiences. "The more similar people are, the less they have to 'go outside themselves' to gather cues; hence the more readily the can respond naturally to their circumstances" (164). Oh? Naturally???????

"There is, however, no research on the relationship between common ground and empathy, though it seems likely that when socioemotional (HUH?) content is involved, establishing common ground is aided by empathy, or vice versa." 164. I go with the "vice versa".

To Bear Past The Light

how many ways will we find to pretend

before we learn to fly

from the heels of our boots

from the pit of our navels

from the throbbing of our foreheads

He almost expected this; it's why he called it impossible so many times. The years have shown him that all events eventually mirror if he turns away long enough to squint. It's fire now that hunts him in the valleys, fire that burns the same each year, fire that burns away the drowning blood of houses. He runs on the cusp where grass meets slippery mud, and knows he should have expected this. It's why he's finding her now, on the beach where he left her; it's why he prefers to leave things in flames. Yet he is unprepared for the impossible meeting; he thought it would be whiter. He thought he had seen it in the mirror of a dark window, noon-sun bright and cheerful, awfully cheerful.

Do the Papelbon

Sorry, my Ohioan friends. I can't resist: GO SOX!

Quote from Sorin Matei

"SlashCom.com is not a meritocracy--it's not anarchistic--it's not like Wikipedia, which is a do-it-yourself-ocracy."

Snarry: Strikethrough07

Click above link

Quote:
Dr. Matei: "What's hot now? What's the new thing?"
Class: "Ummm....We're grad students."

106 Project, courtesy Dr. Matei

Have students make an Amazon.com list of "things every student needs"--connect to their Facebook accounts, give comments, feedback, initial "PR" pitches.

Text-based interaction/Social science stuff

[Walther, J. B., & Parks, M. R. (2002). Cues filtered out, cues filtered in: Computer-mediated communication and relationships. In M. L. Knapp & J. A. Daly (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (3rd ed., pp. 529-563). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.]

In "Cues in, Cues out" the authors argue that "for good or ill, the Internet is a profoundly social medium" (530). To this I respond: No kidding. The word "internet" itself refers to a linking, a sharing of information. How could it be anything BUT social?

They also choose to focus their attention on "text-based interaction" (532). By "text" they seem to assume "words"--chat, MUD, MOO, etc. However, it seems odd to separate the "word" part of online interaction from the visual--even the text is arranged in a visual way, arranged to promote a chronological reading. "Threads" on BBs and some MUDs show not only chronological relations, but developmental ones; topics split, have subtopics and replies. Replies are the heart of BBs, blogs, fan platforms, etc--and these, while mainly textual, have a visual component that encourages a "community" feel, encourages a particular reading of the community (one way or another, depending on the type of community). To call the icons, music, and visual arrangment in general "extraneous" by omitting it from your study is the same as omitting adverbs and adjectives from a study of a piece of literature. You'll get the plot, the structure, the basic point, but the subtle meanings will most certainly be lost. It's not about delivering a message or completing a "task."

Nonverbal cues "filtered out"--researchers assume, the authors say, that the low bandwidth of "text only" communication leads to self absorption and lower social interaction abilities because the social cues used in f2f conversation are not 'present' (visual, embodied). This is, of course, the point of disability studies that focus on the internet, the glory of the online utopianist movement. The noncorporeal means cues are filtered out--but that's good! Those cues restrain us! Contain us! Put us in a chair! Gibson's Idoru plays with this, and comes to few, if any conclusions (although the third part of the trilogy might answer some of those...)Is the body really needed? Are our social cues worth anything?

[Kiesler, S., Siegel, J., & McGuire. (1984). Social psychological aspects of computer mediated communication. American Psyschologist, 39(10), 1123-1134.]


Key idea: Depersonalization. When you go online, you "leave something behind" (Matei). This can create counter productive behaviors--or it can create positive behaviors.
"Is computer-mediated communication simply disorderly, perhaps because there is no constraint on interruptions and distracting remarks?" (1129)
"...in computer communication there is less influence and control of a dominant person, moderator, or leader" (1130).

Baym, N. (1998). The emergence of on-line community. In S. Jones (Ed.), Cybersociety 2.0 (pp. 35-68). Thousand Oaks: Sage.

"Writers who position themselves as participants as well as observers often emphasize emotion in their use of 'community'" (36).
"The dominant concern underlying most criticism of online community is that in an increasingly fragmented off-line world, on-line groups substitute for 'real'(i.e. geographically local) community, falling short in several interwoven regards" (36).
On B Anderson: "I argue here that an on-line community's 'style' is shaped by a range of preexisting structures, including external contexts, temporal structure, system infrastructure, group purposes, and participant characteristics" (38).

First Draft, Short Review

Virtual Utopias and Online Interaction
Thomas More first coined the word “Utopia” for his didactic novel of the same name in 1515. The word’s translation means, literally, “No Place,” since More’s imagined edenic community did not actually exist. Today, our best chance at a perfect no-place seems to be in the non-space of cyberspace. In late 2007, it seems almost ridiculous to talk about whether online communities exist; the evidence of such communities on the internet is overwhelming. The question, however, was easily warranted in the early days of what would become “the internet.” Just twenty years ago, scholars were asking “Can communities exist online?” and “If so, how are they better (or worse) than ‘real’ communities?” What seems to unite these questions, and the driving force behind much of online-interaction research is a Utopianist rhetoric: A progress narrative that searches for the perfect community. This essay will examine both the early questions of the existence of community online, as well as the later, more explicit arguments for online community as Utopia.


Imagined Communities and Online Groups
Although the focus in past years has moved from one of ontology to one of axiology, even in the earliest conceptions of online communities, a definite Utopianist thread can be found fairly easily. I present these chronologically primarily to emphasize the conversation between writers and scholars, but also because technology’s tendency to grow exponentially means that the nature of “online” changes with each passing day—let alone month or year. I begin with descriptions of one of the first online communities—or at least the first to be written about extensively—the WELL. Many scholars begin here, possibly because of the WELL’s extensive archives and utopian reputation.

Howard Rheingold, in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (1993), was the first to write extensively about his experiences at the WELL. Early in his introduction, Rheingold glorifies the internet as an egalitarian venture, he and continues to espouse that point of view throughout this first book: “The technology that makes virtual communities possible has the potential to bring enormous leverage to ordinary citizens at relatively little cost—intellectual leverage, social leverage, commercial leverage, and, most important, political leverage” (1993, p. xix). After an introduction that lays out Rheingold’s excitement for the potential of the internet, the remainder of the book blends theoretical considerations of what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined communities” with the a history of the WELL, and Rhengold’s own participation in it. For Rheingold, the WELL—and we might extrapolate to all online communities here—was “a full-scale subculture” (1993, p. xvi) and a “new kind of culture” where “Norms were established, challenged, changed, reestablished, rechallenged, in a kind of speeded up social evolution” (1993, p.xvi). Few argue with Rheingold that the WELL is, in fact, community; his evidence of interaction both online and in the Real World is extensive, from excerpts from discussions to narratives about his first experiences and later involvement. As an integral part of the WELL community, Rheingold offers a particular participant-observer perspective (“do-it-yourself anthropology,” he says in the introduction), but is also clearly biased.

The history of the WELL might be able to account for its Utopian echoes. As Rheingold, Seabrook, and Matei explain, the WELL was born as a project for the Whole Earth Catalog. Seabrook (1997)succinctly states “The basic idea was that by providing citizens with the technology to do more things for themselves…you could free people from their dependence on mass consumer products and corporate marketing” (p. 147). Utopian notions are built into the WELL, but whether or not the WELL is/was actually Utopia, however, is up for debate. John Seabrook, writing first for The New Yorker, then expanding to Deeper: My Two Year Odyssey in Cyberspace,” began his time at the WELL as a “lurker”—someone who watched the conversations in the postings, but did not participate. Not surprisingly, Seabrook begins his descriptions as an outsider, and thus has a very different viewpoint from the insider Rheingold; his outsider status makes him vulnerable to initiations and “flames” from the long-time users, and Seabrook includes these not-so-flattering comments in his text. Seabrook also does not hesitate to point out the disagreements and arguments that run rampant through the group: “Most of the time the WELL was peaceful and bucolic….But every now and then a thread would erupt into what was known on the WELL as a ‘thrash’” (152). In moving from “lurker” to “poster,” Seabrook experienced his own thrashings, emotional debates between angered community members, the text of which he reproduces and comments upon. However, Seabrook concludes that this insider/outsider divide, while not exactly Utopian, helps create a sense of community; internal disagreements and initiation rites are inherently part of any community, and they tend to help a community form its identity. It’s not surprising that Seabrook begins to echo Rheingold as his description of the WELL moves from insider to outsider status; he eventually states that “the WELL was the closest thing to a functional utopia of free speech of any place I encountered in my two years before the [computer] screen” (p. 185).

Some point out here that the WELL may be a special case; the community was active not just online, but it centered around a relatively small geographical area as well. Even Rheingold himself reminds us that “The WELL felt like an authentic community to me from the start because it was grounded in my every day physical world” (1993, p. xvi) For Rheingold, it was grounded in his physical world, but for others, online communities may be entirely ephemeral—users may never meet, may never even be in the same time zone. The lack of interaction outside the bulletin board, blog, or other online platform can easily lead to stresses that the early WELL easily resolved. In the revised edition of The Virtual Community, Rheingold addresses his critics in an additional chapter, titled “Rethinking Virtual Communities,” by helpfully outlining, and then answering a series of questions that emerged from his first book: “Is the use of the phrase virtual community a perversion of the notion of community? What do we mean by community, anyway? What should we know about the history of technological transformations of community?....Are virtual communities simulacra for authentic community, in an age where everything is commodified?....Most important, are hopes for a revitalization of the democratic public sphere dangerously naïve?” (p. 325). These questions continue to frame discussions of online community today, and Rheingold offers his own story of moving from naïve enthusiasm to knowledgeable critique as an example of how quickly the conversation about these issues can change. While this older Rheingold is far less naive, however, he is still equally enthusiastic, and he offers a thought experiment of ways to use internet-generated funds responsibly, “not…an unattainably ideal society expected to emerge magically from technology” (p. 391). The question of the quality of “community” in “virtual community,” he reminds us, is still up for debate among researchers.

By the late 1990s, however, scholars seem to agree that online communities are, in fact, communities; the term “community” itself undergoes some redefinition with the emergence of online groups, and online groups begin to see themselves as real, working communities. As the internet became more accessible to more people (with the evolution of the World Wide Web and America Online), scholars began to question not the existence of these groups, but their qualities, and their inherent potential to cause social change in the Real World. As Rheingold says “More than ever, we need to ask the right questions today about what kind of people, what kind of societies might emerge from social cyberspaces tomorrow” (p. 323). And for Rheingold and others, the potential for something approaching Utopia online seems vividly apparent.

Utopia, Communitas, and Agency

Rheingold first addresses the utopian tendencies of discussions of online communities in the introduction to the first edition of Virtual Communities. In the revised edition, however, Rheingold is far more explicit: He acknowledges that in his first book, he might have put a “rosier tint” on the WELL in order to emphasize the “realness” of it—to argue against the view that only “socially crippled adolescents would use the Internet to communicate with other people” (p. 324). He adds that “Perhaps prospects for online life were brighter then, seven years before the dotcom era” (p. 324). In Rheingold’s books and in the articles that follow below, a “bright” vision of the internet, what I am calling “Utopian,” is primarily egalitarian, “democratic,” and free from corporate intervention. The utopian online community mirrors, not surprisingly, the utopian commune experiments of the 1960s and 1970s.

Sorin Matei makes this connection explicit in his article “From Counter Culture to Cyberculture.” Matei gives a brief history of the WELL’s connection to the Whole Earth Catalog, analyzing WELL posts for their inherent counterculture assumptions and value, as well as for evidence of “community.” Matei concludes that the WELL, in imaging itself as a new type of commune experiment, superimposes a counterculture rhetoric over the already utopian language of technological progress.

New technologies have furthered the idea of cyberspace as utopia. Blogging and wiki functions have expanded the egalitarian language outside of just communities to other forms of online interaction; now, even encyclopedia writing is framed as a purely democratic and collaborative, if not utopian experience. What makes these shift from mere democratic language to utopian can be seen in Wikipedia’s own “neutral point of view” policy:

The policy requires that where multiple or conflicting perspectives exist within a topic each should be presented fairly. None of the views should be given undue weight or asserted as being judged as "the truth", in order that the various significant published viewpoints are made accessible to the reader, not just the most popular one. It should also not be asserted that the most popular view, or some sort of intermediate view among the different views, is the correct one to the extent that other views are mentioned only pejoratively. Readers should be allowed to form their own opinions. (“Neutral Point of View”)

The above policy posits an imagined space where bias can, in fact, be removed enough to allow each individual to make up his or her own mind. Neither popularity nor expertise will guide the user toward one reading or another—Wikipedia imagines intellectual freedom without gatekeepers.

Blogging, like wiki, is seen as a bottom-up movement; networks of writers report the news in non-legitimated forms, without the oversight of editors or corprorations. Communities form around some blogs, and users work together to create new knowledges. The grassroots language used to describe the blogosphere echoes the WELL’s vision of a non-hierarchical information exchange . David Weinberger’s(2002) Small Pieces Loosely Joined is equally optimistic about the potential of the World Wide Web: “The Web is about groups—people who, in one way or another, can look into one another’s eyes. Groups are the heart of the Web” (p. 105). These groups then go on to produce shared knowledge

Of course, these utopian visions of a perfect democracy fail to account for several factors. Wikipedia depends upon a somewhat naïve notion of collaboration; the belief that “Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy” (McHenry, 2007). And it is quite clear that Wikipedia’s knowledge-building strategies depend upon not only experts and hierarchies, but traditional higher education forms as well—citations are required, an encyclopedic language is recommended, and even the collaborative “talk” pages require a rhetorical savvy that more closely mirrors academic review than a conversation on the street.

Conclusions: Community and Desire

What these theories fail to account for is how online communities transmit, manage, and contain desire, and the division that comes with it. As these new technologies continue to emerge, scholars have turned to the more complex questions about online communities: What is the draw? How do these communities hang together? How can we predict success or failure? How might a utopia actually emerge? The concept of “Communitas” has been proposed as a working hypothesis of community maintenance and progress. According to the The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Religious Rites, Rituals and Festivals, “Communitas… is a relational quality of full, unmediated communication, even communion, between people of definite and determinate identity, which arises spontaneously in all kinds of groups, situations, and circumstances” (p. 97). Communitas is essentially utopian, it “strains toward universalism and openness; it is richly charged with feeling, mainly pleasurable” (p. 98). The very idea of “Communitas” depends on the assumption that all communities are continually striving toward perfection, toward a harmonious balance between individuality and community.

However, “Communitas” itself is dependent upon an understanding of rite, ritual and myth. An addition of Rene Girard’s concept of “scapegoating” as community maintenance to the already important sociological concept of “communitas” seems prudent at this stage of theory-building. The remainder of this essay will give an overview of Girard’s theory and how it might contribute to the already well-developed ideas presented above.

In Girard’s Things Hidden, which is the culmination and condensation of several of his earlier works, Girard theorizes that desire and difference are dual (and inseparable) causes of the disintegration of communities. To counter and manage mimetic desire—which leads to the destruction of structured societies—a ritual (with an accompanying myth) is required, specifically, a ritual of sacrifice and victimage: “The death of the victim transforms relations within the community. The change from discord to harmony is not attributed to its actual cause, the unifying mimesis of collective violence, but to the victim itself” (p. 48). According to Girard, community maintenance depends upon this scapegoating of a pre-selected victim—a victim who is the Other, who represents difference within the community; a myth and narrative arises naturally from repeated scapegoating. Thus, myth becomes “the transfigured account of real violence” (p. 109), and the initial murder moves to the symbolic—the scapegoat is murdered “symbolically” through language.

Seabrook’s reproduction of some of the arguments on the WELL show a definite scapegoating mechanism at work in that community—one member even goes so far as to sarcastically note that s/he is the “System Scapegoat” whose “shortcomings…are the source of all problems on the WELL” (Stewart Brand, qtd in Seabrook, 1997, p. 158). It is unlikely that other scapegoats and scapegoaters are aware of their role—this would, in fact, deconstruct the scapegoat process and make the community vulnerable again. Finding scapegoats and the myths and rituals that surround them in online communities might be one way to approach theories of community maintenance. It also points us away from the naïve utopian rhetoric that seems to dominate much of our discussions of online communities: finding scapegoat mechanisms reminds us that online communities are just as vulnerable to difference and desire as physical communities, and that it a disembodied, non-corporeal topoi is not likely to resolve the basic problems of human interaction.

Works Cited
Girard, R (1978). Things hidden since the foundation of the world. Trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer. Stanford, CA: Standord U Press.
Rheingold, H. (1993). The Virtual Community: homesteading on the electronic frontier (Revised ed.). New York, NY: HarperPerennial.
Seabrook, J. (1997). Deeper. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Rites of Communitas (2004). The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Religious Rites, Rituals and Festivals. Ed. Frank A. Salamone. New York: Routledge, 97-101.
McHenry, R. The faith-based encyclopedia. Retrieved 15 Oct 2007 from http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html.
Weinberger, D. (2002). Small pieces loosely joined. Perseus.

A rant against (some) Org Comm assumptions

Org comm: Created to study communication--or lack thereof--in organizations (i.e. corporations). The goal is to create happier employees, “harmony” in the company, better relationships between managers and underlings. This of course, assumes that “work” should be harmonious, assumes we can make a job into an identity, and that we SHOULD invest so much of ourselves into our corporate lives. This is a palliative for the late capitalist condition of alienation of labor and reification of wage labor.
Org comm wants to create a participatory work environment, covering up the ‘real’ power relations at work, hiding the hierarchy. Consent is being manufactured, and we are helping! The very existence of Org comm reifies the current economic structure, instead of subversively deconstructing it; it is anti-Foucauldian at best.

Of course, I'm being broad here. But this is what I'm seeing in the literature, and it's scary. Marlene, our visiting "prof" from Brazil brought these to the fore for me; she's questioning the very basis of organizational communication, and that's good. Too bad there aren't more of her....

Missing Pieces

From Richard Lanham's book.

"Linear prose can only say one thing at a time" (83).
"Such figures [puns]--though to my knowledge, no one has ever thought to construe them this way--strive for greater productivity" (83).
"We need to use the human brain more efficiently. We need to find new shapes for traditional arguments and shapes for new kinds of arguments" (115).

While I won't disagree with anything Lanham says here--how could I?--I want to question his attitude toward this emerging change in text. Throughout these first three chapters, Lanham takes a fairly positive view, calling this transition to an information economy "progress" at one point in the introduction. His vision isn't necessarily utopian, but this text is celebratory: We are moving forward toward greater human (cognitive) achievement. Go us.

Even as we do so, as the above quotes show, we necessarily align ourselves with an ideology of productivity and personal gain. It may be the Anabaptist in me that shrinks back at this: as we rush toward some greater understanding and the mass of human knowledge reaches some critical point, are we really doing any good in the world? What is it we are striving for? What happens when we get there?
And what about all of those people who cannot react quickly enough, either from lack of physical ability, or lack of education? The flow of information is not as free and egalitarian as Lanham would like us to believe; the world of stuff permeates everything, including our access to the world of information (which in turn, limits our access to stuff...). While greater efficiency and large changes in attitude toward text might make sense and be a boon to educated middle class (and upward) people, the vast majority, the Masses, feel only information overload, not improved communication. And from what I've seen of information science in public schools, the utopian vision of a pure economy of attention is not only unreachable, but it ignores the day to day struggles of the lower classes and categorizes them as either nonexistant or unimportant to our sense of the "general" human condition.
Again, I find myself thinking of Levinas: How does the economics of attention allow us to afford any attention at all to the Other?


Giant Gerbil Ball (Reply from Morgan Reitmeyer)

What could an immersive book look like? Lanham has talked about the movement away from interactive texts and back towards traditional texts (only they’re on a computer screen). He also talks about the way that books, at least for those of us who really adore reading, are an immersive reality all to themselves. I have always shied from ebooks for many of the reasons that Lanham mentions: they are not mobile, there is nothing to touch and write on, I feel left out of the text and am interrupted by scrolling or button pushing. I just never found a love for them, and would rather read something that is on paper—yet I am able to spend hours online flipping back and forth through pages of information. How can this be? The way I read a novel or article is of course very different then the way I read online. Online I am generally skimming to the paragraph that feels like it hold some nugget of truth, or I am reading for brief information (recipe, factoid…). It seems that the texts online don’t quite take it far enough. How would it be different if I could be in the text? And how would it be if my actions actually changed the text? I was desperately looking for this wonderful thesis that one of the MFAs at Colorado State University made while I was just starting. She had a site where how you moved and selected text (which faded in and out and was hauntingly cool) changed the story that would appear and/or evolve. It was one of the most effective online creative texts that invited you into the process. Also, I am curious about the way it would be if, as we read/interacted with a book, we were in a virtual world of the text… I haven’t fleshed out what this would look like, and it might be part of my 3D library mind map of love, but this giant gerbil ball might be part of it.
Submitted by Morgan R. on Tue, 2007-02-20 10:06.

In the text, out of your apartment (reply from amylea)
Submitted by Amylea on Tue, 2007-02-20 10:56.
One of the romanticized notions of "reading" is the ability to escape to another world (perhaps a gerbil ball). Has anyone read the Thursday Next books by Jasper Fforde? The main character actually does go inside the text. There is a central Library of all books ever written, and all their permutations, and there is a policing body known as Jurisfiction that monitors all fictional worlds to make sure the plots are maintained. Excellent literary theory masquerading as novels.
But E-books (or, as the Next books posit, Book 2.0) don't even come close to this. Sad As an avid fanfic reader, I have been known to read online texts just as I read novels...but it is still very hard to do. My attention wanders to the advertisements, the links, the awards, the stylized fanart banners. One cannot curl up with a laptop, particularly when one must have it plugged in. Sad Maybe smaller will be better? I don't own a PalmPilot or BlackBerry...yet.

Can't wait till we can just download stories into our heads and watch them play out in a controlled hallucination. Fun! Cool

Later post:
VizRhet = design elements
I went flipping through our design book for fun--how bizzaro. I learned pagination by the sink or swim method. No textbook, no instructions; just Amylea, a jaded former Journalism professor, and an old Mac running Adobe PageMaker 4.0. I learned design organically, coming to realize (after the oscilating fan was thrown at me) that I needed to think about things like Grey Scale and Gutters as tools of manipulation, as audience control. In other words, the rhetoric of a newspaper is less in the copy than it is in the white space, hierarchy, serifs, and cropping. And in how I choose to arrange them. Editors-in-chief might look like they have the power, but people like me get to direct attention and give order. All thanks to a mouse and some well-placed shading.

Seeing these things explained so clearly in our book feels like someone explaining how to write the letter B again. I wonder if I would have done as well as a layout editor if someone had explained it to me, however. What I do now when faced with a blank Adobe page is more like a Blink moment: it's instinctive, pre-conscious, and wicked fun.
Submitted by Amylea on Tue, 2007-01-23 09:25.

How it began...
Fanvids, or why I'm in this class

I know we're supposed to be at an early stage here, but I've been working on this awhile...

Given the ease of video editing software and the proliferation of web-based forums on which to post amateur productions, it's not surprising that fanvids have become a favorite tool for fans of television and film to create new arguments about their reading of the original text. "Fanvids" have the potential to return control of the text to the reader by giving the creator the power of suture. By analyzing vids from two different fandoms, I hope to tease out what it is these amateur auteurs know about visual rhetoric and how they choose to either accept or ignore Hollywood film conventions in order to make their arguments. Specifically, I will look at the argument for a romantic relationship between Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy (of Harry Potter) and the argument for a romantic relationship between Jack O'Neill and Daniel Jackson (Stargate: SG-1).

I plan on usnig Henry Jenkins' Textual Poaching and Laura Mulvey's work on suture as my starting points, but I'm open to just about any framework to help me sort through all this data.
Submitted by Amylea on Thu, 2007-01-25 10:42.

Replies:
David Blakesley on Thu, 2007-02-01 06:32.

There are lots of interesting issues swirling around the topic of FanVids, so looking at them from the standpoint of visual rhetoric should prove very interesting.

Not too long ago, I did some work related to a sample essay in The Thomson Handbook on the subject of FanFic, so I have a few additional resources to suggest (in addition to the sources you've already mentioned--Jenkins, Mulvey--and particular FanVids). These focus on Tolkein FanFiction primarily, but they still might be helpful (I hope).

Bacon-Smith, Camille. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992.
Chonin, Neva. "Love Between Men Is a Powerful Thing in Lord of the Rings." 15 Jan. 2002. SFGate.com. 11 Aug. 2002. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/01/15/neva...

FanFiction.net. 2006. .

Godawful Fan Fiction. 2006. 17 February 2006. http://www.godawful.net/mb/

Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. See his website/blog: http://www.henryjenkins.org/ and this useful discussion: http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/09/how_to_watch_a_fanvid.html

Rice, Anne. “Important Message from Anne on ‘Fan Fiction.’" 2000. 17 February 2006. http://web.archive.org/web/20000511150950/www.annerice.com/scoop.htm

Schulz, Nancy. "The E-Files." Washington Post 29 Apr. 2001: G1.

Smol, Anna. “‘Oh . . . Oh . . . Frodo!’: Readings of Male Intimacy in The Lord of The Rings.” Modern Fiction Studies 50.4 (2004): 949-79.

Here's a Star Trek FanVid hosted at Salon:
http://www.salon.com/ent/video_dog/misc/2006/09/13/kirk_spock/index.html

It would be interesting to do a FanVid on FanVids. . . .

Finally, check out Atom Films:
http://www.atomfilms.com/home.jsp

Fandom exploding
Reply: Submitted by Amylea on Thu, 2007-02-01 10:43.

I've read some of these (and quite a few others...); some of the Buffy studies have nice essays on feminism, female fans, and the gaze.

Recently a Buffy site added "BadFic" as a genre. The fics are chock full o' cliches, bad dialogue, and even worse plot elements. Fans seem fond of creating new "genres"--"angst" and "Revenge" are two that come to mind. But is "Bad" really a genre? Or maybe it is only a genre for fan based texts?

Fanvids
Reply: Submitted by Ryan on Thu, 2007-01-25 10:49.

Amy, aren't you going to explore the Kirk/Spock love affair? This sounds really interesting, as current technology has allowed amateurs to alter the narratives of their favorite stories. I am also interested in the point where technology comes far enough for amateurs to expand the stories of their favorite cultural products instead of just re-editing existing footage. I wonder if computers will ever allow the seamless reuse or expansion of special effects and filmmaking to let fans create footage beyond that which is poached. Just a thought - the project itself sounds very interesting.

Slashing the Captain
Reply: Submitted by Amylea on Thu, 2007-01-25 10:53.

Ryan,

The K/S slash has such a long history to it...and the fans are mostly adults who don't have time to edit fanvids. Sadly.
I think.


Later in the semester:

Desire and FanVids

After Eye and Brain we already knew that what we see is always already an interpretation--the gaps get filled in, past experience dictates our emotional responses, conventions give shape to the shapeless. But Elkins takes this one step further to argue that there is an element of desire that underpins all of these interpretive reactions. We desire to possess the things we see and, in turn, see the things we desire to possess (Elkins 31).

Which got me thinking about my project (mais oui!). Most fanvids create relationships that don't exist: Hermione/Snape (Harry/Snape...anyone/Snape), Daniel/Jack, Ed/Roy (of Fullmetal Alchemist)...Kirk/Spock. For these fans, simply writing a world in which these relationships exist is not enough--although fics usually accompany vids. They desire to make manifest a relationship and are now able to do so with photorealistic quality. No more cheesy fanarts or recreations in Paint--thanks to some strategic cuts, overuse of slo-mo, and the sometimes inappropriate fade, fans can make what they want to see appear to be real.
And this comes to be acceptable based on where thes vids appear: Like the film Elkins saw in two different locations, fanvids can appear rather cheesy if viewed next to the original video, or quite artistic when viewed from a fan's own webpage steeped in the fandom (ever see a Harry Potter themed fan site? Oh, the backgrounds!). Some would argue they're cheesy either way, but those comments usually come from those who have no desire to see that particular relationship played out. Or, The Few Non-Fans that exist. Somewhere.
Submitted by Amylea on Tue, 2007-02-27 10:54.

Reply: Submitted by Morgan R. on Tue, 2007-02-27 10:56.
Amy, could you post a few links to some of the Fan Vids... I admit that I have never experienced one....Mad Morgan Rackem (aka Morgan Reitmeyer)

Some Slash Vids...brace yourself
Reply: Submitted by Amylea on Tue, 2007-02-27 11:09.

Harry/Snape (aka "Snarry")
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzkwx2D-tt0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3xDxDGucEk

Daniel/Jack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnF-_kLnQBg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrQrKbT7f0I
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These videos kind of hurt me
Reply: Submitted by Morgan R. on Thu, 2007-03-01 10:48.
These videos kind of hurt me somehow... I don't know why. Harry and Snape most especially...Mad Morgan Rackem (aka Morgan Reitmeyer)

Fan Trauma
Reply: Submitted by Amylea on Thu, 2007-03-01 10:51.

There is a kind of trauma or violence I feel when I watch these that I don't feel in fanfic. It's not that I can feel the edited cuts so much as the perversion of images I know so well puts things off balance. I start to feel bad for the characters, because I see them being manipulated--although, they are no more manipulated by the fans than they are by the Hollywood producers/directors/editors who put them in the original composition.

Even Later in the semester:
Clarification: FanVids

While I can find quite a bit of information on fanfiction and fan communities in general, very little has been written about fanvids, apart from Machinema. Because I am not so much interested in the community-driven aspects of fanvids, however, these articles will not comprise the majority of my research.

I could also cite Walter Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (and probably will), but again, authenticity and authority are not my main concern. Because I want to figure out what it is fans-auteurs know about visual rhetoric, what conventions they mainly rely on, and what genres they most heavily draw on, I will most likely have to rely on film theory.

What is complicating this project is the musical element: Fanvids don't just rely on Hollywood conventions, but on music video conventions. I'm not sure where to go looking for research on this, but I'll start with the cultural studies journals. I'm not sure yet whether there are different genres of fanvids based on genres of music videos (or genres of music), but the ones I've seen all seem to fit within the same romance-filled, teen-angst genre. This may be, however, because I am looking at arguments for "unconventional pairings" (Hermione/Snape and Daniel/Jack), which are based on unfulfilled desire. There are so few fanvids for "canon" or established relationships that I'm starting to think that "angst" just might be the key emotion of the genre.
Submitted by Amylea on Thu, 2007-02-08 10:57.

Fascinating
Reply: Submitted by magnoliafan on Thu, 2007-03-01 10:48.

This sounds like a really fascinating project. I think that a good place to go would be popular culture conference programs, because the ones I've been to seem to be invested in the kinds of questions you're asking.
L-Train (Lars)

Visual Genres
Reply: Submitted by David Blakesley on Thu, 2007-03-01 09:31.

Amylea:

One possible trajectory would be to look at a variety of "prototypical" fanvids to see if there has emerged a visual style that amounts to a genre--a socialized response to a situation--using film and images. I think you're right that the genre will be influenced by music video, perhaps even the roving camera technique it initiated and that became a staple of shows like NYPD Blue and other TV shows.
To what extent to these (re)presentations violate traditional video genres like realism? What sort of mixing/mash-ups might they employ? Your goal could be to establish just what techniques do seem common and (even) what role technologies (and video editing software) have in determining them.

Some of Amy's replies to others:
Submitted by Amylea on Tue, 2007-01-23 10:58.

I'd like to put Levinas and Burke in a (parlor) room and let them hash this one out: Burke seems to suggest that rhetoric can be ethical, because it encourages us to identify with the Other. Levinas, as Mark says, considers any attempt to change the Other to be unethical. "Reading" the "Face" would be a violence for Levinas. But if we're all doing this unconsciously anyway, is it really unethical, since ethics involves choice?

Lovely Levinas
Reply: Submitted by mark p on Thu, 2007-01-25 10:40.

I don't really remember too much about what Levinas had to say about unconscious behaviors, but you do pose an excellent question concerning this. Yes, ethics always involves choice. But Levinas also refuses to work in clear good/evil, right/wrong dualities. Choosing to not be ethical is not evil or wrong, it is simply further away from the good. Therefore, I wonder if choosing to not explore the subconscious reactions to reading the face would not be a matter of unethical, just a slide further away from the ethical good. But then, if they're subconscious, how can you consciously choose to explore them? I wonder if that makes a difference? Maybe I just felt like typing the word "Levinasian." Yeah, that's probably it.

Unconscious Levinasian
Reply: Submitted by Amylea on Thu, 2007-01-25 10:51.

Isn't it "The Good"?
What I remember about Levinasian ethics is that we are to be in a perpetual state of putting the Other before ourselves. The only evil for Lev-baby is the "betrayal" that comes with self-interest. I don't think Levi would fault us for our unconscious behaviors, as long as we consciously acknowledged the humanity(Being) of the Other...which we do through encountering the suffering and the Face...which tends to be visual....whether or not it's rhetorical is another question, I suppose?

Ethics
Reply: Submitted by Ryan on Tue, 2007-01-23 10:51.

This is very interesting, because I don't know anything about Levinas and would like to. Therefore, please take my comments with a grain of salt. There are certainly ethical implications in the idea of reading faces, as the seven seconds in the Bronx chapter indicates. However, the work of Gladwell complicates the idea that we cannot play on emotions that others are not conscious of, because Blink suggests that emotions can be communicated without either party being conscious of them (using conscious in a loose sense meaning "aware.") You write "However, in a Levinasian sense, it would be unethical to read the face of someone else and use the emotional cues found there to persuade them before they have any conscious awareness of their own emotional state." However, if I am think slicing the face, I may also not have any consciousness of the emotion I just read, even though I am reacting to it. Furthermore, the chapter suggests that people may express emotions that they are not conscious of. This seems to complicate Levinas' ethical standards, though I do like them as an ideal.

Other blogging moments:
Barry and Persuading the Rhetorician

Let's assume for a moment that we all have normal amygdala.

Assuming that our first response has been channeled through the thalamo-amygdala system--a gut reaction, an "emotional" moment (I don't like the word emotion for this), then the most effective rhetoric is that which takes advantage of this system. If we could know what images/sensory input evoke which reactions, we could create a text working to persuade based just on those. No logos needed.

I've always wondered how it is that smart people--rhetoricians, for example--are still able to be persuaded, even when we know they're being persuaded, and can articulate rhetorical elements at work. And yet I still want to see Movie X, or I think that car is really sweet. What must be at work is this gut reaction, this emotional response that is stronger than logic.

Thoughts?
Submitted by Amylea on Thu, 2007-01-25 11:13.

Does Pathos Come First?
Reply: Submitted by David Blakesley on Tue, 2007-02-06 07:17.

Good questions, Amylea. All things being equal, I think there is this tendency for pathos to outshine the other appeals. However, the rhetorical moment extends over time and space, so it's not the only appeal that gets through, and the "well-educated trout" knows how to differentiate types of interpretations because it can be dangerous to always give in to the first impression. That does happen often, though, that's for sure.

It's important not to discount it, as some people do, valuing instead the purely logical appeal. I think they always work in concert (or should) and that one without the other is a recipe for failure (from the rhetorician's side).

There's the likelihood also that the event itself "teaches" us to react to its eventfulness. We monitor our reactions as we read (or view) and those reactions in turn have affect in their own right. It's also interesting to think of how unrelated aspects of context change the effects of appeals. (One thing in one context might mean/affect quite differently in another.)

The missing semester

In August of 2007, in all their infinite wisdom, the administrators of the Drupal sites at Purdue decided to move to a new server. Now, those who contacted the administrator (Jeremy Tirrel) in time could have their sites archived on the new server--a simple copy and paste job. Those who did not, well...we always knew the internet was ephemeral.
But what surprised me was that Dave Blakesley, Drupal Man himself, advocate of Drupal-ness, Mr. Lets-just-hold-class-on-the-Drupal-site, the Champion of web archiving for future generations, did NOT request our Spring 07 Viz Rhet class be archived and moved. While he kept one page, with the calendar with our readings, all of the real meat of the class--the discussions that began with intellectual bravado and ended with "*Mark does the Buffy Dance*"--are unavailable, unless I'm incredibly stupid at using websites.
So, it is gone. Just gone.
Of course, nothing on the web is ever truly gone. Well, not text anyway, so I've spent all afternoon hunting down Google's cache of my old posts--because I had some good ideas in there, somewhere, some lovely sentences that should not be forgotten.
This missing semester problem is one reason for the Internet Archive project (archive.org). Some people find the project a bit frightening--particularly those people who posted embarrassing or potentially slanderous things on a website somewhere. And I admit, the very ephemeral nature of the Web is one reason I like it--the easy mutability is somewhat comforting. You can edit yourself into a public perfection. But the Archive project seeks to catalog the Web's changes, its various mutations. Each update, each minor edit.
If you go to Archive.org, and search for www.bluffton.edu/~bccleala you can find, minus images, my old website from undergrad. Along with nearly every major edit I made. You can also find the old Witmarsums (edu/~witmarsum), Gerald's old pages, etc.
So I'm off to archive myself, so that I can prove to myself that Spring 07 really happened. Because writing, as Walter Ong, Derrida, and others remind us, is Memory, immutable mobiles for us to stack up as visual proof of our own existence. And I'll be damned if I let a server change destroy 16 weeks of my memories.