"Every Home Is Wired":
3 -- The Progressive Rock Community on the Net
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Participant Types and Identities
Thus, "it seems to be the case that most newsgroups have a small coterie of habitués, with consistently presented personae, who regularly initiate and contribute to message threads, and in the patterns of their posts and replies one can find the traces of what we have come to call virtual community" (McLaughlin et al. 93). The question then arises how individuals approach the online Prog community, its various newsgroups and mailing-lists, how that community affects them and their self-given identity, and how user types from members of that 'small coterie' to infrequent posters to non-participating readers emerge. Bit 52
At any given time, a variety of interaction from one-to-one messages to many-with-many discussions occurs simultaneously on the Net, and even, as we have seen, in individual newsgroups: two-message exchanges in which one poster's request for information is answered by another participant and long-running threads where varied and varying groups of users debate can coexist side by side without interference. As Morris & Ogan describe it, then, "the Internet is a multifaceted mass medium, that is, it contains many different configurations of communication. Its varied forms show the connection between interpersonal and mass communication that has been an object of study since the two-step flow associated the two" (42). It may well be that many of the competing mass media effects theories put forward in this century (from the two-step flow and its opinion leaders, and theories predicting massive, limited, or no effects on the audience, to concepts like Noelle-Neumann's 'spiral of silence') apply simultaneously to different parts of the Net audience. Bit 53

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© 1998 Axel Bruns