Community Revisited

Way back in June, Nogbad & I had a debate about "community".

I was laying down strict criteria for a community & therefore arguing that lurkers were not part of the community in which they lurk:

For me, a community needs more than commonality. There has to be interaction & bilateral consciousness of participation. I'm doubtful whether "lurkers" can be truly considered part of a community in most cases. Observers, maybe, but not members. When I read conferences on FirstClass without identifying myself or posting messages, I don't regard myself as a member of the community served by that conference, just as a visitor, an "outsider".
(...)
"Lurkers" (unless identifiable via message histories etc.) are unseen, unknown - you cannot interact with somebody who, to all intents & purposes, isn't there, & though they may be participating (passively) the community is not conscious of them. Hence consciousness of participation is one-way, not bilateral.

Nogbad made the point (backed up by Kat) that having the potential to contribute is what sets a lurker apart from, say, somebody at home watching TV. The TV audience has commonality, but no opportunity to interact (either with the show or with each other). The lurker does have that opportunity, even if it isn't taken up & s/he remains invisible (metaphorically, of course) to the rest of the community. At the time, I wasn't convinced. I think I was attributing far too much significance to invisibility.

I smiled at this sentence in Rheingold:

If I had encountered sociologist Barry Wellman and learned about social network analysis when I first wrote about cyberspace cultures, I could have saved us all a decade of debate by calling them "online social networks" instead of "virtual communities.

I completely see his point & it removes my mental block. A network can comfortably accommodate both active & passive nodes. Once somebody is connected to the network, they are indubitably part of it, unless/until they decide to disconnect themselves (or are forcibly disconnected - ostracised). They are inside the boundary...

Since June, I've taken some baby steps in systems thinking, been exposed to the network paradigm & dabbled in the sociology of cyberspace. The message is slowly getting through :-)