An On-line Community: A Case Study

One of the most interesting aspects of being a member of this community is the way in which the concept of "off-topic" issues is handled. The members of this virtual community are bound together by their liking (in many cases life-log passion) for mysteries but are otherwise a very diverse group, ranging from high school students to retired engineers to district attorneys to stay-at-home parents. Because the individual experiences of the members are so diverse, the discussions (whether over a particular poison would in fact act the way it does in a novel to whether the depictions of children in fiction are realistic) are wide-ranging and usually fascinating.

The list (and the moderators - who generally have a fairly light hand although have periods during which they tend toward the authoritarian) is generally fairly lax in allowing what might well b

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r three times a year one of the listmembers will become personally incensed over such an off-topic thread in less than a day and post a quite nasty message along the lines of: "If I wanted to read about what stupid people who probably don't even like mysteries have to say about stupid foods I'd go join a stupid-food-name list. I'm here to talk about mysteries." Such flames (or personal attacks) are usually met with censure by the moderators (who can throw people off the list for behaving uncivilly) and by a flood of messages from members of the list (including those who do not often post messages) suggesting that the flamer chill out. These messages from other listmembers invariably follow this pattern: "We were just having a bit of fun about a topic that is loosely linked to mysteries. While this is a list for those who love mysteries, we are all interested in other things as well, and these other interests mean that sometimes we stray off topic. We'll all be back on topic quite soon, however, so if you don't like this thread, just skip over the messages about it and wait a day or two." It should be noted that such off-topic messages never constitute a majority of the hundreds of messages sent to the list each day except un
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1743
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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