Too many topics, too little time

Jason Nolan, Knowledge Media Design Institute, University of Toronto

Jeremy Hunsinger, Center for Digital Discourse and Culture, Virginia Tech

Submissions due January 15, 2005

''Less of You, More of Us: The Political Economy of Power in Virtual Communities''

The goal is to bring into the dialogue a number of researchers on virtual community who are looking at the borders and peripheral locations that are ignored, unknown or explicitly overlooked. Within the notion that community, often the walls we build around ourselves formÊ mechanism of power and preference, this issue will examine online communities that are excluded or self-excluding from the dominant forms, norms and discourses. For example, there are a large number of researchers inquiring into the recent blogging phenomenon, but I have heard many explicitly exclude technologies/communities such as LiveJournal.com with his 3.8 million users (1.7 active), and discount the value ofÊ teenage bloggers, who are mostly female (67% of Livejournal users). Because researchers tend to cover familiar territories, we encourage authors to explore alternatives. Our issue will provide researchers with the opportunity to expose the readership to a wider sense of virtual community and what is going on at the edges of the event horizon.

Some of the anticipated themes are: hacking virtual community; the overlooked, broken down, subverted or reconceptualized virtual communities; borders and breaches, the ordering of virtual community; hacktivism; sexually focused virtual communities; questioning the value of online community; collective intelligence is just the fordism of the mind; the Slash Fiction communities; MOOs the early forgotten virtual communities; and the code beneath the community – exploring programmer and system administrative communities.

Submissions should be sent to both: jason.nolan@utoronto.ca and jhuns@vt.edu
Web site: http://www.acm.org/sigs/siggroup