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[striver]

When I started this forum it was the first of its kind, an online community to discuss and study the psychological and sociological aspects of online communities. I started it because it was something that interested me so I began writing about it in my own journal. There were so many people who took an interest in those posts that I began looking

Comments

[striver]

are you a student or professional in a related field? or just interested in the subject? Are there any questions you have about it you would like to see discussed?

I have a feeling you may be right in the respect that people feel they have nothing to contribute. But I kinda personally feel everyone has something to contribute. It is just that sometimes the atmosphere in a group makes many people think their contributions would be trivial. But to me, some of the most interesting comments have been from regular people saying "I feel..."

[neptunia67]

I am one of the students who asked for input into a research project. Had I received any comments asking for research results, I would have gladly provided them. Alas, I had no responses to my post, and since the survey was anonymous, no way to tell where the responses came from

[striver]

yeah...that was an aspect I thought about as I wrote about students posting input requests here. There are seldom any responses so you can't really blame them for not posting the results. It is like speaking to empty chairs.

And I also prefer this to facebook. Perhaps I am just more familiar with LJ since I have been here so long. I have a facebook account but I generally only log into it to decline the occasional random friend request :)

[neptunia67]

I use FB for my "public" face, and LJ for my more personal entries and deeper conversations. FB is shallow, and technically kludgy.

[spacemind67]

By keeping open, do you mean still allowing new entries? I hope you don't mean delete the whole thing. Why not put a hold on it for awhile and assemble a best of or just leave it as it is without further entries? Some people like to go back and look at earlier entries.

[striver]

good point.

My primary thought has been that there are now far more spam posts here than actual discussions so it has become more work than it is worth...although even that isn't much work since even the spam posts here are rare. But if posting is halted then that isn't a concern and the information here would remain available. I will keep that in mind.

[sunlit_shadows]

agreed. it would be a shame to delete all of the archived conversations- those are still valuable.

[gregrichey]

I would like to see it stay open. Even a few occasional posts are better than nothing. I personally don't understand killing off old communities/blogs/accounts. It's still a good resource with lots of people watching in theory, even if many are more actively using facebook. I haven't found a similar resource on facebook, however. If nothing else, a link to a mirror group on facebook would be good, but I think LJ has a different feel and structure for communicating.

I think with expanding online resources (like facebook), ppl tend to spend less time on LJ in general. I certainly post less now than I used to. But I would still be up to contributing if I felt I had something worth adding to a discussion. And I do enjoy reading what is posted.

[aizjanika]

I agree with this for the most part. I'd like to see the community stay here with occasional posts or even no posts at all.

I prefer LJ for online communication. My LJ flist is as large as ever and many are also posting on Dreamwidth or on both sites. I belong to many active communities, but also many inactive communities and that's fine with me.

[queer_theory]

As the first responder said, I also feel that I have little to contribute. I'm a student, but very early in my studies. I'm in my second sociology class right now, and joined the community because I was interested in reading what people more advanced than me had to say.

I also disagree, as the second responder did, that all of the serious people have moved to Facebook. My f-list is as busy as ever. Perhaps that's because I'm involved in fandom, which never goes away. I agree that Facebook isn't a great forum for having involved discussion. Twitter isn't either, though I've had a Twitter account since 2007 and enjoy it. I prefer LJ to most other places I go online.

I don't know if you should keep this open. If it's going to continue to be slow, and if many of us feel unable to contribute, there probably is no point.

[striver]

you know...sometimes fresh outlooks can be more informative than those who have been immersed in academic society. Not to insult any serious academics here but it is becoming fairly widely recognized that the academic world has suffered badly from inbreeding so to speak. It sometimes becomes a perpetuation of outdated and even disproved ideas. Perhaps your thoughts and feelings at this stage might be more useful to this discussion that you think. There are probably many students out there at the same point as you who would be very interested in what you have to say.

Why did you choose sociology and have your feelings about it changed since you started serious studies?