Kollock, Peter., & Smith, Marc (1996) Managing the Virtual Commons. In Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, edited by Susan Herring. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 1996. pp. 109-128. [available online∞]

Discussion leader/summarizer: AndrewBabson

Note: as there are no page numbers, my citations are approximate

Overview and Background

Authors:

Sociologists Kollock (UCLA) and Smith (then a grad student with Kollock, now at Microsoft)

Goal:

To present the basic ways in which "computer-mediated communications technologies alter the economies of cooperation" (last paragraph of article).

Driving Questions:

• "In the face of temptations to behave selfishly, how might a group of people ever manage to establish or maintain cooperative relations?"(Section 1, 2nd. para.).

• "In the face of the free-rider problem, how is cooperation possible?" (Section 1, 3rd to last para.)

• "To what extent can group members regulate themselves, providing collective goods and managing common resources without recourse to external authorities?" (Section 1, 3rd to last para.)

The Volume: Edited by Sue Herring, a linguist, it's an early, multidisciplinary crack at how CMC research can offer new perspectives on fundamental social questions.

Summary

Kollock and Smith (hereafter K&S) are broadly interested in how Usenet groups manage themselves, independent of external or centralized authority, and produce and maintain collective goods in face of classic two social dilemmas: 1) individual interest tends to override public ("tragedy of the commons") and 2) not all individuals have to contribute to creating a public good to enjoy it. The "free-rider problem" is central to both- i.e., if one person can benefit without contributing, the rest of the group will lose motivation to contribute- and dissolves cooperation.

K&S apply Ostrom's (1990) research into how communities have overcome the above problems to Usenet groups to determine if they meet the seven principles of successful community design, and thus overcome the free-rider problem. This analysis is couched in a larger discussion of the social opportunities and challenges CMC presents.

Structure

The basic premise of the research, roughly aligned with that of the volume, is that "new possibilities emerge in computer-mediated interaction, [and] cyberspace provide(s) an important research site to explore this fundamental question of social order " (Section 1, 3rd to last para.).

Sections 1 and 2 are introductions to theoretical underpinnings and the Usenet medium, respectively, while Sections 3 and 4 in turn deal with a) the free-rider problem plays itself out in Usenet discussion groups and b) design principles of successful communities.

Analysis

Usenet groups are thematically conceived email communities with little to no external control. Because the currency of the discussion group- or sticking with the authors' terminology, public good- is knowledge, contributions are archived. Social norms mostly prevail, though as K&S point out (Section 4.3) "(I)t is very difficult to force anyone to do anything -- this is both the charm and frustration of the Usenet."

Members can't be too self-interested, no matter what the temptations are of overusing one's share of seemingly unlimited bandwidth, contributing little to group knowledge, or flouting decorum. The ability to reach a wide audience instantly, to vent one's frustrations or lurk ad lib. can lead to media-particular instances of the free-rider problem.

Usenet groups are computer-based public fora that provide cost-effective means of mass communication. This may invite spammers and other low-investment participants such as flamers and free-riders, but what K&S call a "community kill file" can be implemented. In addition, Usenets can be easily defined by name and restricted (e.g. by membership mechanisms), turning away those not invested in providing the public good of information. Anonymity, which encourages free-riding, can therefore be limited in Usenet groups. (PaulResnick: actually, it's in priniciple technically feasible to have restricted groups, but it's not possible in practice with the existing Usenet infrastructure.)

Although there is no a priori external authority, groups can decide to nominate a moderator in order to maintain stability and usefulness for group members. FAQ's provide a scaffold for newbies, but moderators may be needed to help further, as FAQ's are inherently a product of more experienced, and therefore more invested members. Moderators can encourage newbies to participate in knowledge sharing.

The public nature of posting may inhibit most from breaking group rules, mitigating the need for formal sanctions. Though K&S mention that most respond to informal mechanisms (4.3), an external resolution should be sought if needed. (PaulResnick: their point is actually that there is no external authority to appeal to with Usenet. At best, you can cede authority to some members, by giving them moderator privileges.) AndrewBabson: External was a bad choice of words- I meant to say formal.

Usenet groups, according to the authors, succeed in ways particular to the medium of the internet, but this doesn't mean further research findings cannot shed light on limiting free-riding in non-virtual settings.

PaulResnick: Somehow, I'm losing the key points of their analysis in your summary. The "common pool resource" that can be depleted if overused is people's attention, or bandwidth in the authors' terminology. The "public good" that may be underproduced is useful information such as answers to questions. AndrewBabson: The public good as information point I tried to make clear above, but as for bandwidth, I could have made attentional aspect of bandwidth clearer. The authors described bandwidth as both the limited technical capacity to store information and the limited attentional capacity of users (Sec. 3 para 2.).

Critique

There is a lot of theory to buy into in order to accept not only the conclusions of the study but the conceptual framework and the methodology of the study itself. It's light on first-hand evidence but maybe they engage primary data more in their book, which I haven't read. But about how to go about answering some of their questions: conversation analysis and ethnomethodology could shed light onto the crucial context issues that, to their credit, K&S at least raise, albeit perfunctorily, in section 3. On the one hand, such a methodology could help expose the validity of some of the categorizations they use and open a window onto the complexity of the interactional world they're discussing. On the other, if one accepts that a) communities share strictly definable design principles, b) that free-riding is a problem, and c) that external authority is an unproblematic term, then fine.

But b and c presuppose a lot of Marxist theory, and a a whole lot from one study. Maybe we can discuss this in class?
PaulResnick: I don't see the connection to Marxist theory-- can you spell that out here? AndrewBabson: Sure- maybe I should have said "MArxian", but...no external authority could be read as the no state, sharing could equal giving up private ownership of a good (in this case as I mention above information), little to no hierarchy could be seen as lack of social classes, elimination or at least mitigation of the free-rider problem (I know this is anachronistic, but it relates to Olson's critique that Marx and Engels didn't fullt consider the free-rider problem) is defeating self-interest that undergirds capitalism. It's a guess, but it seemed Marxian to me, anyway.

Other smaller critiques: K&S talk about visibility, but that doesn't always equal identifiability. Also, in the last section, the first sentence is:

"As computer-mediated communication increasingly becomes the media (italics mine) through which public discourse takes place, the ways in which that discourse is socially organized becomes more consequential."

My question: why _the media_ rather than _a medium_? A utopian slip that might a) be an innocent sign of the times or b) betray a flawed overprivileging of CMC.

[NoorAliHasan: Or maybe Kollock and Smith saw the potential of CMC to enable personal publishing. But then again, it could be a typo.]

Finally, the next sentence : "While systems like the Usenet are continuously changing, their present form has implications for the future nature of a society increasingly woven together by these technologies." Insert "an elite" between "of" and "society". And which society? Despite their reliance on cross-cultural research, K&S forget that CMC is limited, even today, to a tiny fraction of the world's population.

Connections with other readings, ideas etc.

I think this connected with a number of other readings-

- Galston1999: Galston, W. A. (1999). Does the Internet Strengthen Community?, [available online∞]. Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy.

- Chapter 6 in Smith and Kollock: Problems of Conflict Management in Virtual Communities.

And also from that week, Lampe, Cliff and Paul Resnick. Slash(dot) and Burn: Distributed Moderation in a Large Online Conversation Space. In Proceedings of ACM CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vienna Austria. 2004. [available online∞]

[NoorAliHasan: The idea of a community kill file reminds me of the Slashdot karma system.]

- Katz1985: Katz, M.L. and Shapiro, C. (1985). Network Externalities, Competition, and Compatibility. American Economic Review. 75(3): 424-440.

Class Discussion

NoorAliHasan: I found it interesting that Kollock and Smith described lurking as a form of free-riding behavior. I always thought that lurkers don't participate due to some sort of online social awkwardness. Does anyone know if any research has been done about lurking? Is it really free-riding (simply being self-interested) or is it based on some social fears?

AycaObekci: What about just lack of knowledge to participate? Having nothing interesting to say on a subject, or having no answers to people's questions (as in the case of a beginner programmer in an advanced programming list, or a 10th grade student in a sociology discussion list)..

AndrewBabson: I have one from a collection of papers from last year's International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS). It's called
"Passive Forum Behaviors (Lurking): A Community Perspective" , by Fei-ching Chen of the Institute of Learning and Instruction, National Central University, Taiwan.

PaulResnick: Here's another. Nonnecke, B. and J. Preece, Lurker demographics: Counting the silent, in Proceedings of CHI'2000: Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2000: Hague, The Netherlands. p. 73-80.

DerekHansen: There's been quite a bit of research on lurkers lately, much of it done by Preece and her co-authors (see PaulResnick's quoted article and J. Preece, B. Nonnecke, D. Andrews, "The top five reasons for lurking: improving community experiences for everyone" in
Computers in Human Behavior 20 (2004) 201–223. Also, not surprisingly, Wenger held a workshop related to lurkers and peripheral participation with some of the work summarized here∞. I have a few other articles on lurking - if anyone else is interested they can email me.

I also have to wonder about whether lurking is truly free-riding. I am not convinced that much of the "content" contributed—the flames, off-topic comments, &c—are any less selfishly motivated than the non-contributions of one who simply wants to follow an interesting thread without adding to it. How is this different from following a blogger without commenting on the posts? Likewise, while a non-poster may not be contributing to the communities "store of currency" by adding knowledge, (s)he is certainly contributing to the group's end goal by becoming better informed about the subject under discussion. Guess I should look at the above-referenced papers. However, lurking, in turn, allows the lurker to spread such information in other forums, in addition to increasing the site/ lists' potential value to advertisers by adding another pair of eyes to the mix. Anyone who sells advertising must appreciate this. Of course, this does not apply to most usenet sites or list-serves, but as online communities migrate onto the web—where they are more likely to be encountered by non-members—it does become a consideration.

LaurieBuis: Like the above, again, I do not see lurking as being a negative thing. While I see the argument that lurking is a form of free-riding, I don't see how it is necessarily harmful. From a numbers perspective, we have talked this semester about the fact that too many contributions to an online community can cause the value of the discourse to diminish. Perhaps there is value to lurkers (who may or mayt not not have any valuable contributions to make) not adding to the load of content already on the web...

RebeccaTremaglio: LaurieBuis beat me to this last point, which is that while lurkers may be free-riding in the sense that they're not contributing anything visibly helpful, at least they aren't contributing anything unhelpful either. They're not flaming, off-topic, or hogging up the bandwidth on unnecessary posts.

FrankLester: I think one problem is the seeming conflation of free-riding in an offline community and free-riding in an online community. Kollock analogizes banwidth and the "open pasture" in Hardin's tragedy of the commons, but it's not clear to me that that analogy fully holds. Though Kollock lists a number of acts that he defines as an unwise use of bandwidth (e.g., reproducing long portions of previous postings), many of these violations seem more due to laziness or ignorance than they are specifically "unwise." In the case of some communities, it's unclear that lurking is the social ill that Kollock makes it out to be. In fact, lurking is encouraged in some communities as a means of helping newcomers to understand the context and the content of the community (and as Sproull puts it, lurkers get benefits from passive participation), and if the newcomer jumps in with the sorts of aggressive participation that Kollock defines as non-lurking, she is chastised for being presumptuous; it would be like a tourist in another country presuming to understand the customs of that country after having been there for less than 24 hours.

Addendum

Ostrom's seven design principles:

1. Group boundaries are clearly defined
2. Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions
3. Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules
4. The rights of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities
5. A system for monitoring member's behavior exists; this monitoring is undertaken by the community members themselves
6. A graduated system of sanctions is used
7. Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms.

Ostrom, Elinor (1990) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. New York: Cambridge University Press.