"Every Home Is Wired":
3 -- The Progressive Rock Community on the Net
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Generally, then, such disruptive behaviour must be seen as a sign of feelings of non-membership in the newsgroup community, especially when contrasted with the community's reaction to the disruptions: as Marc Smith writes, "collectives must exercise two forms of power to maintain their common goods, first, they must restrain and punish individual actions that exploit or undermine collective goods ... , and second, maintain the commitment of members to continued participation and contribution through rituals and other practices that increase the individual's identification with the group and acceptance of its demands" (n. pag.). This, then, is done in the meta-discussions already described, which emphasise the beliefs and interests common to the community, but also reiterate the behavioural norms and netiquette that are generally accepted. Bit 42
There are also milder forms of disagreement (sometimes approaching flames), largely about particular quite topical points such as the canonical position of certain bands, individual musicians, albums, or songs. These differences are only to be expected in any sufficiently large and varied community -- many mechanisms for dealing with controversies are fairly similar to those employed offline. Herring notes that "virtual communities, like communities 'in real life', must protect the interests of their members, and ethical dilemmas result when individual and group needs come into conflict, as well as when certain groups dominate in defining the terms of the discourse" (4-5); online communities may provide simple means of avoiding such confrontations, though, by way of filtering, scanning, and the division into various newsgroups and special mailing-lists for different sub-communities. Bit 43

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© 1998 Axel Bruns