When I first started in on this study, I was thinking that there probably wasn't much to this whole web community thing. After all (without naming names), many, many sites have the highest in aspirations for creating community, but the people they attract really seem to have no interest in seeing a community grow. These sites are dominated by huge amounts of gutter level, bargain basement conversation.
In my mind, web sites did little for creating a global village. Putnam [6] argues that many factors, including the vast increase of suburban sprawl after World War II for example, have reduced the amount we interact with each other. What I had seen on the Internet had given me little reason to think that this new vehicle for communication would help somehow increase our social capital, at least not in any major way.
I chose Jazz Central Station (JCS) [2] for this study because it is a well designed site that seemed to have a fair amount of conversation going on. I have a love of Jazz so I knew I could at least talk to the folks who frequent it. At JCS, the chat rooms were empty which seemed even worse than gutter-level chat I had experienced before. On the other hand, there was at least more targeted conversation on the newsgroups, so that gave me some hope.
As I began exploring JCS, I was hoping to find at least a few threads of conversation that were interesting, but I was ready to start a few if I could not find any good ones to report on. I admit it -- I was pretty pessimistic. What I found in JCS, though, was quite different from what I expected. But let's start at the beginning...
At first glance, JCS is nothing more than any other music site. It has features on musicians, an online store where you can purchase their CDs, and some live news feeds from the jazz community. Other features include a theme song (quite nice), a live feed from WBGO (a jazz station in New Jersey), and the Cafe among others.
The Cafe is really the place where JCS tries to build community and they make a point to let you know. On the front page, for instance, is a chance to participate in a "Weekly Jazz Poll," the results of which are posted in the Cafe. Listed as a "highlight" on the front page is the newest addition to the "People in Our Neighborhood" feature, the full text of which is posted in the Cafe. Finally, there is a "community pulse" out front which links directly into the newsgroup "Jazz Talk" which is found you-know-where.
In essence, JCS starts from the very beginning trying to pull people into their community. It is also important to note that this begins a self-selection process. For example, most folks will not click on any of these features unless they have an interest in jazz.
The Cafe has many features intended to create community including the aforementioned Weekly Jazz Poll, People in our Neighborhood, newsgroups (or BBS as they call it), as well as an online chat feature.
The Poll and People in our Neighborhood are great features that build community, the former by giving a giving a sense of what people who visit the site are thinking, and the latter by honoring especially impressive members of the community. Chat is used mainly for special talks with famous people -- not many folks use it day-to-day. Ultimately, the real interactive portion of this community are the newsgroups, so that is what I will focus on here.
First impressions of the BBS are quite nice. The interface is probably the best designed web-based newsgroup system as I have seen. For example, the front Cafe page shows the three most recently active threads for each of the five official newsgroups (users cannot start their own). This immediately gives folks a feeling that there are other people around and gives a sense of where to find them.
As we dig deeper into the newsgroups, though, some cracks begin to show. One particular problem is the posting interface, which is entirely forms based. All one need do to post to a newsgroup is type in their name, their e-mail address, and the text of the post.
There have been countless instances when users posted obnoxious comments anonymously. Many times, these posts will just be generally annoying, but as the disrupters get more familiar with the site, sometimes they do make personal comments. Each user that I spoke with said the best way to deal with this kind of anti-social behavior is just to ignore it, but this is not always easy.
Unfortunately, there is a more troubling problem here: the impersonation issue. This kind of interface not only allows anonymous posts but, worse, anyone can post using anyone else's name, effectively impersonating them. One particularly tough case of this happened when a well respected member of the community seemingly posted something to the effect of: "I'm not a racist, I just don't like black people." The community was shocked and many folks posted to that effect. When the actual user returned, he was stunned as well. It took significant work on his part to convince the management that it was an impostor who posted the message.
While some have argued that the open posting interface is an inclusive feature -- allowing folks who are not technically savvy enough to have e-mail to participate -- for the most part, it has proven to be a security hole used for less than wholesome purposes. As one user put it, "Worst thing that can happen is somebody can use your name. To me that is a capital crime."
Fortunately, those in charge are interested in resolving these problems once they arise. Still, a better solution might prevent more of these incidents before they start. For instance, JCS might require the use of password-protected accounts to post. The extra time required to get an account would serve as an additional barrier to entry for the disruptive. The password would assure that nobody could impersonate anyone else.
Donath [1] makes some good arguments for the importance of anonymity in virtual communities. One example is the need for anonymous posts when revealing personal details on USENET newsgroups like alt.support.depression. However, by all accounts, anonymity clearly has little place here.
In spite of these technical glitches, conversation thrives on JCS' newsgroups. Regulars excitedly discuss new releases by their favorite artists, newbies ask questions about the nature of jazz, and sometimes (make that a lot of the time!) a spirited dispute breaks out.
The first hint I got that something special was going on at JCS came as I interviewed people for this paper. Interview after interview, these folks knew each others' names and could recall a variety of things that person had done in the past. Many folks even recall the occupations and home towns of other users.
One user, Dan (name changed), told me of a special friendship he struck up with a much younger girl in another country we'll call Kim:
On most online services like AOL, this relationship would be very suspect. That doesn't happen on JCS -- you come to trust folks over time and nothing can break that trust besides your own stupidity.So that's why it's so easy to share all this personal information which we don't share with the outside world...
Once trust is established, the best thing you can do is not double-cross that. Basically the way it works with the people I've met on JCS.
Dan and his friend have exchanged photos and he has even met Kim's father and brother at a conference, though he has never met her in the flesh. All that brought them together was a common love of jazz and a place to share it in.
Another thing that struck me over time was how several users mentioned that they worried about other members when they did post on JCS for a while. Dan again:
Certainly among the regulars, we're a community. If someone doesn't show up for a while, we start putting out the APBs! Usually they show up and say "Here I is!"Sometimes somebody who knows them personally will post and tell everyone where they are...doing fieldwork in the Himalayas or something.
Still, I was left wondering what creates a community like this. During my many years on USENET and participating periodically in several special-interest web sites, I never found such a close-knit place. Answers followed as I spent more time with the site.
Clearly one reason for the closeness of the community is the site's focus. Most folks will not stop into a jazz site if they are not at least slightly interested in the subject matter. As we dig deeper, we see a the newsgroups are organized thoughtfully. There are five official newsgroups: jazz talk, classifieds, the gig board, recommended listening, and education. Each has a specific purpose which is clearly stated on the main Cafe page.
Having a focused site with well thought out newsgroups does not immediately create a wonderful community, though. How do we make sure only people who are truly interested in nurturing the community stay around? This is where the secret features come in.
Hidden within JCS are a number of secrets than one only discovers after being involved in the community for a time and behaving in a reasonable manner. These secrets are like the key to the community -- without them, one is not a true member in good standing.
This is how one of the secrets was revealed to me: I started off looking for interviewees -- sending mail to a number of folks who had posted on the site and seemed to have a vested interest in the community. One user mailed me back, asking about two pages worth of questions about me, my musical interests, and my intentions, among other things. Only after I had mailed back sufficient answers, did he reveal the secret: "Why don't you post on the 'Who are You?' thread and tell us a little about yourself and your study?" he asked.
Now, this thread was certainly not overtly hidden -- no threads on the site are. In fact, all the threads in the official newsgroups are visible to anyone who visits the site, and any time someone posts to it the thread will show up on the main Cafe page as recently active. However, there are hundreds of threads and the low frequency with which folks post to the "Who are You?" thread mean that it is very unlikely that a first-time user would encounter it.
The thread itself has posts for many of the regulars on JCS. Some users post their "life story" to the thread, others post laundry lists of their interests, still others just post pointers to web pages or shorter blurbs. Essentially, the thread holds home pages for many JCS regulars. Since posts are time and date stamped, one gets a rough idea of when each user was accepted into the site (i.e., told about the thread). Since users can post to it more than once, it can be updated while maintaining a sense of history via the older posts.
Another thread called "What are you listening to right now?" is a bit less covert. As you might guess, it contains posts from many folks on the site indicating the album or albums they are currently listening to. As one interacts with the site, the rate at which the thread is updated gives the user a sense of how many other users are around and what jazz they are enjoying -- it's the musical pulse of the community. Many times this group also serves as a jumping off point to discuss the musicians in question, either extolling their virtues or debating their merits.
One important thing to note about these threads is that there was no technological support necessary to create or maintain them beyond the basic newsgroup structure. Essentially, these threads are creations of the community -- uses of the technology that go beyond it's developers' intentions: home pages and a real-time music ticker built by the users.
The final secret I discovered is "The Chair" (sometimes also called "The Empty Chair"). The Chair is a covert newsgroup, meant for discussing non-jazz related topics. It is not mentioned with the other newsgroups on the main Cafe page. There is a hidden icon for it in the navigation bar (see Figure at left), but I know of no one who managed to find it on their own.
After participating in newsgroups for a while, one might see the heated statement, "Take it to the Chair!" Essentially, this means the topic is not jazz related and should be moved to The Chair for further discussion.
I do not think there was really a clear reason for making The Chair hidden to begin with. Perhaps part of it was just keeping it hidden from management: "It was fun to have a secret place," explained one user, "it was like a shared secret...then when management found out it felt as if we'd lost some of that yummy intimacy."
Now I think it serves a deeper purpose, though. Since the entrance to The Chair is hidden, folks who just stop by the site and move on never find out about it. Essentially, it guards against folks who are not interested in jazz taking over and making tons of non-jazz related posts. This is not its purpose. Instead, it is meant as a place for JCS regulars -- jazz lovers -- to periodically discuss non-jazz topics. Hiding the entrance helps maintain the intended audience for the newsgroup.
The inner workings of JCS were becoming clearer to me. To take the idea of JCS as a community further, we might think of a set of community criteria and see if JCS meets them. Amy Jo Kim gives us a set of criteria [3] by which we can better understand what makes JCS tick.
First, we look at the purpose of the community, and JCS' purpose should be clear. Anyone who is interested in jazz and is clear on their knowledge level about the subject is welcome. There is no written mission statement other than to support the jazz community. The visual design reflects a train station, which, as a popular mode of transportation, probably harkens back to an era their target audience remembers. It certainly reflects a classy personality when compared with other sites.
On the other hand, there is no backstory for the site, though older threads on the newsgroup do form one kind of history. In addition, nobody I talked to could tell me where the train station motif came from.
Next we look at how well the site supports distinct, member-extensible gathering places. There are two main gathering places as we mentioned before: chat and newsgroups. Chat is generally used for moderated conversations with famous people. Newsgroups, on the other hand, are the main sounding board for JCS. There are a fixed number of groups as defined by the site maintainers. Folks whose posts are inappropriate for a particular group will get flamed and sometimes the maintainers will move the posts to another group but this is quite rare.
The site does provide what it refers to as a "Site Map" to help folks get around. It provides a good overview of all the site's major sections, but might more reasonably be referred to as a table of contents.
At first glance it may seem that users are not adding to the site in any other way than posts to newsgroups. As mentioned above, though, the "Who are You?" and "What are you listening to right now?" threads are forms of user created, user maintained additions to the site. I am sure there will be others.
As far as more advanced communication features, probably chat would qualify since you need to download software. Unfortunately, this feature is so "advanced" that most people seem not to have tried it.
There is no official rankings structure for users. However, everyone I interviewed seemed to have a very clear idea of who was very knowledgeable on the site and who was not. Simply posting questions and responses on the newsgroups is the site's main showcase for feats of virtuosic musical knowledge.
The third criteria is allowing users the ability to create member profiles that evolve over time. JCS certainly has this in the form of the "Who are You?" thread I mentioned earlier. Not anyone can post to the thread because it's hard to find if nobody tells you about it. Folks can post data on themselves and then post updates later, forming a kind of identity history. Finally, the site allows users to display all the posts by a given author. This allows anyone to get a complete history of anyone else's interactions on JCS.
Does JCS promote effective leadership? Well, since the site is commercial, the explicit leaders are the owners of N2K [4], the company that runs it. Jill Maxi Schreibman is probably the closest to the official host of the community. As far as leaders within the community, I think there are several folks that are generally respected and looked to for advice, but there is no leadership system per se. Also, there is no official tech support system, though folks generally help one another within the newsgroups when questions arise.
Fifth is the definition of a clear-yet-flexible code of conduct. While there is very clearly posted code, the "basic standards of conduct," it is not quite clear how users might contribute to it. According to a source at N2K, the code is mainly to protect the company from legal action.
The site does a fair bit to organize and promote cyclic events. While there are no truly cyclic celebrations, they do have an occasional one. For instance, JCS included some special features for black history month. There is a newsletter called JazzTrack which comes out weekly and contains a whole host of pointers back into the site, including interesting posts, contests, and the like. Surveys are a big deal on JCS, too, in the form of the Weekly Poll which I mentioned earlier. Finally, there are numerous contests sponsored by Gibson guitars, Yamaha basses, and others. The most recent one is "Win Your Favorite Wine with Toots Thielemans," which gives the winner a $200 gift certificate for their favorite wine and the CD "Chez Toots."
On the other hand, JCS does not do much to provide a range of roles that couple power with responsibility. There is no real division between visitors, new members, regulars, docents, or leaders. Folks who fall into any of these categories have the same power to post, participate in chats, etc. Owners, on the other hand, have a great deal of power including the ability to single out members for special recognition in Community Profiles, move threads to different groups, create new newsgroups, moderate chats, etc. The only way users may move to the owner role is by becoming employed by N2K.
There is also not much support to facilitate member-created sub-groups. The only way for users to simulate the creation of such groups is by creating a new thread and putting a group descriptor in the title. One example is the "(for chickies only)" in the subject of a thread for women. But, there is no way for users to really control who views these posts.
Finally, we want to be able to integrate the online environment with the real world. Within JCS there is a "festivals" page which lists a number of jazz-related festivals. Many times, JCS users who are all attending the same festival will get together there. In fact, there is a planned meeting at the Texaco Jazz Festival this summer in New York City.
In addition, members often mention holidays and personal events that occur in the real world and get support from the community. Recently, George Howard, a jazz saxophone player died of cancer. The outpouring of support on JCS was just unbelievable. Many people were clearly moved. In fact, one user told me he just sat in front of the monitor and "I'm not ashamed to tell you -- tears were falling like rain."
Overall, then JCS speaks to nearly every one of Kim's design criteria. I believe she would have no trouble seeing it as a community, and perhaps not such a bad one at that.
So, let's move even deeper into the site. What are it's stories? What has happened to make people so attached to it?
Overall, JCS users are a pretty trusting bunch. As one user put it, "It's a very tight community. You're quickly accepted into the community and provided you don't screw up...you're accepted and loved..." So, if someone shows up and says their doing a study for a class, the community is likely to accept them and try to help.
This is exactly what happened when a user named only "Trish" showed up and claimed to be doing a study for a class. Even though she provided no e-mail address and asked typical marketing questions like "How much do you spend on CDs per month?" folks were happy to answer and did so in droves.
As time went on, Trish's darker side began to show. In fact, at one point she ended up telling one poster who did not think her questions were reasonable to "shut the hell up and stop wasting my valuable time." Still, people continued to answer. Perhaps folks on JCS are too nice sometimes.
Sam (name changed), one of the administrators of JCS, told me "it was really obvious that it was a competitor using the open forum of the bbs to gain free info." Even now, readers of the thread can see obvious holes in Trish's story. For instance, in her original post, she misspelled the name of the school she claimed to be attending. Sam posted several times, getting increasingly suspicious in his tone. Eventually other users caught on and began voicing some trouble with Trish's supposed study as well.
In the end, Trish got very obnoxious and finally left the site. Of course, through the kindness of the JCS community, she had managed to amass a huge amount of data that could be used for marketing purposes. This was one of the darker hours for the free and open policies of the JCS newsgroups.
To be honest, though, it is truly impressive that this type of invasion does not happen more often on JCS. This appears to be one of the only examples of clear cut and long term abuse of the system.
So, yes, there are a number of difficult things that have happened on JCS. As I talked to people on the site, though, this was not what stuck out in their minds. For the most part, what they talked about were the life-affirming experiences they have had because of their involvement with the site. For example, Adrian (name changed) lives in a part of the country where jazz is not respected, and sometimes even feared:
I've developed the attitude that you can waste a lot of time trying to win people over in terms of getting them to listen to jazz, especially where I live. People here are so (grrrr) myopic for lack of a better phrase. I try to get some constructive dialog with folks and the only thing that comes to their mind when you mention jazz is Kenny G.
For him, JCS is the only outlet into a more open-minded world. JCS provides a live feed to a good contemporary jazz station in New Jersey, WBGO. In his town, the only station that plays jazz plays it only a few hours a day, four days a week. More importantly, JCS gives him a connection with people he can relate to, people he can converse openly with:
When computers start controlling you, that's when you have to back off, but I look at JCS as a relief from the everyday norm. I love it. It gives me a chance to express myself and articulate myself the way I like to do.It's something that I rarely have with human interaction here.
In the course of our talks, Adrian told me a number of stories of special experiences he's had with people on JCS. Perhaps the most touching is one regarding a request for help that he saw on the site.
A woman in a far away state posted a request for lyrics to a song she wanted to sing with the philharmonic in her town. The performance was coming up in the next couple days and she could not find the lyrics locally.
As soon as he saw it, Adrian posted: "Hold on -- I'll get it to you sometime this afternoon or evening." He went out and searched a number of local shops. Finally, he found what amounted to the last copy of the song in the whole state. "When I saw the lyrics, they blew me completely away," he told me, "It's one of the most beautiful songs ever written."
He went back the next morning at 1 am and typed in all the lyrics for her. Not long after, she responded through e-mail with one of the most beautiful expressions of gratitude Adrian had ever received. In his words: "Just seeing my name on the screen from someone I never met saying thank you just made me feel great."
Not only did JCS serve as a medium for Adrian to help a newfound friend several thousand of miles away, it also served as a catalyst for him to go into the community and discover new real- world resources. What he found was beautiful music that he never knew about before. This is a prime example of the power of JCS.
Having spent many more hours on JCS than I had intended, I can attest to the strength and the pull of the community. People are emotionally attached to it in ways that I never expected. Certainly, I am attached to it in a way that I never dreamed. In my mind, JCS is most definitely a Great Good Place [5] on the Internet. In fact, the way users talk about the Cafe, one might not even realize that it only exists on a server somewhere. Adrian again:
I see a pretty decent sized jazz club with tables and chairs, low lighting and a very serene atmosphere. Everybody knows your name. Everybody wants to shake your hand and is genuinely glad to see you.
Perhaps that is the point. These communities are more than the place the exist in, and ultimately that place does not even matter. The place -- the technology -- is just a catalyst to bring a very special group of people together. Ultimately, that is what JCS is all about.