Reading Response to Kollock and Smith : Managing a computer-mediated communication system

When the Internet was created not much was known of computer-mediated communication systems. As packet switching was developed in the 1980's and data could now be sent quickly throughout the Internet, the possibility of online communities became a reality. As mentioned by Kollock and Smith in their passage "Managing the virtual commons," the first public community on the Internet was created in 1981 and is known as Usenet. Usenet functioned as a massive bulletin board system and was made up of different newsgroups with each one serving different topics of interest. As the successor to ARPANET, Usenet became an extremely popular CMC (computer-mediated communication) system and thus a large online community was created. To communicate with others on Usenet a simple text editor is needed to post and reply to others. When a post is created it is sent to everyone who is part of the newsgroup. In Usenet newsgroups consisted of every topic imaginable including anywhere from a current event group to a horror movie group (Kollock and Smith, 1996).

In a computer-mediated community face-to-face contact is left out. On Usenet the main communication was through text and some audio. This brings up an issue on how similar an online community is to a real community with face-to-face contact (Kollock and Smith, 1996). To understand how an online community works you must first understand how a real community is managed. As mentioned by Ostrom, in Kollock and Smith's passage, a community that is organized and able to govern themselves has a set list of principles. They are their boundaries are defined, the community has a set of rules and institutions and the behavior of the community according to the rules is effectively monitored and sanctioned.

In Usenet these working face-to-face community principles are implemented. The boundaries of the newsgroups are set up by the name of the group which helps sift out people that aren't interested in the topic and keep free riding to a minimum. Also available are private groups which keep unwanted newcomers out of the newsgroup. As I just mentioned free riding is the biggest problem of Usenet. Many newsgroups contain FAQs which state the rules and regulations of the group and help control free riding. For those of you unsure on what free riding is, some common examples are posting off topic, posting too much (effects the Usenet bandwidth), asking questions and not answering them, and leeching off of other peoples information which is known as lurking on Usenet (Kollock and Smith, 1996).

I agree with Kollock and Smith as sanctioning these free riders and users who don't cooperate with the rules, to be the biggest downfall of CMC communities. Since there is only contact through text in these communities it is difficult to keep people from straying from the norm. Without face-to-face contact there are really no painful consequences for those who consistently disrupt the newsgroups. People can spam many newsgroups at a time with ads and make fun of other users without any serious action taken. The worst thing that can happen to a rebel user is a ban on their account and this can easily be bypassed if the user wants to create another account and keep generating havoc (Kollock and Smith, 1996). I believe this is why a CMC community can never be considered as a real community. A lot is there in a CMC community that resembles that of a face-to-face community, but without the proper enforcement in is more like that of an unruly jungle. I like the way computer-mediated communication is going and I believe it can accomplish a lot in interconnecting the world. Usenet was a good start in this process and with some more beneficial ways of enforcing rules in these online communities like ISP bans or fines. I realize this might be hard to track and implement, but when signing up for an account, if more personal information is given such as your drivers liscense number, this could become possible to do. If these sanctions are taken you might someday see a CMC sytem as a true, functioning community.

Bibliography

1. Kollock, Peter & Smith, Marc. (1996). Managing the virtual commons: cooperation and conflict in computer communities. In Susan C. Herring (Ed.), Computer-mediated communication: Linguistic, social and cross-cultural perspectives (pp. 109-128). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.