I have started this thread at Bobert's kind suggestion. Over in another thread, I revealed that I cannot escape my book learnin' as an anthropologist even while online and that I often find myself drawn into observing certain emerging patterns of behavior on Mudcat or other online communities. Academic indoctrination overtakes me and I find myself observing, documenting, categorizing and theorizing about online behavior here and elsewhere.


This came up in what was a light-hearted thread about the prospect of killing off a screen persona. Kill-joy that I am, I began to joke about and then relate the details of emergeing patterns of behavior in large internet communities that center around just that thing - the deliberate ruse of the death of a user's persona.

Here is a link to that thread so you can go and read my posts there:

Death of a Forum persona

In that thread I described the patterns that one tends to see online when a female user on a deal site decides to kill off her persona and re-emerge as a grieving family member of the dead persona. I described the motivations for engaging in such and act, the potential rewards and the potential downsides. I also described similar acts of sympathy-gathering that don't involve death but do invloce the tellong of a tale of escalating tragedy and woe.

I further described the roles various community members choose to assume in response to these sympathy-gathering actions, including the role of the Vampire "truthsayer from the darkside" who emerges as a vigilante keeper of the forum laws to punish the Sympathy-gathering behavior.

I described how such behavior tends to manifest here on mudcat and how it differs from large deal websites. I believe this has a lot to do with the large male presence here and the generally older demographic. Deal sites have a huge influx of young women from lower income backgrounds who join the sites to try and save some money. Mudcat on the otherhand draws people with different motivations - a desire to share an interest in an art form.

Rather than re-tread what I said in the other thread, I will leave it to others to bring some of those issues over here for discussion.

In the meantime, I will dedicate this thread to the discussion of observed ONLINE Mudcat behavior patterns and how those ONLINE behaviors may affect OFFLINE life for forum members, forum members' families and perhaps the world in general!

Behavior doesn't happen in a vaccum. It happens because there is something to be gained from behaving that way. The gain can be fore the individual, the community or both. Sometimes the gain that is sought is viewed as harmful or destructive by the community or a user or users who observe it.

Let's talk about patterns of behavior here. Who benefits from them, why we do various things, why we say certain things.

Let's explore how we interact as a community and how our interactions compare and contrast with other observed online communities. I believe Mudcat has avoided some of the nastier patterns I described in the other thread specifically because of our demographic make-up and our motivations for being here.

Here's where we hash out such theories. Bobert can go first. OK?