Identity and the Internet: Mapping Scholarship on Cybercommunity

Brian L. Ott

Nancy K. Baym. Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000. ix + 249 pages. Appendices, references, and index. $79.95 (cloth); 34.95 (paper).

Research on the Internet has spread almost as rapidly and unpredictably as the technology itself. In the last decade, scholars in Sociology, Political Science, Education, Composition, and Communication have employed a vast array of research techniques and methodologies to begin to understand the ways in which online interactions shape, alter, and reinforce the relationship of individuals to the social world. Of particular interest has been the matter of identity, both individual and collective. How, for instance, does one negotiate one’s identity online and what, if anything, are the implications of such negotiations for the offline self? These questions lie at the heart of Nancy Baym’s book, Tune In, Log On, in which she reports on a three-year study of an Internet newsgroup dedicated to soap operas.

Given the disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological diversity of research regarding online identity, this review seeks to map Baym’s study in relation to the existing literature. Toward this end, the review is organized around the principles of intersection and absence. The general aim is to identify what Baym does and does not do in this study, and to allow readers to judge its usefulness to their own scholarship. Tune In, Log On is an ethnographic study of the text-based Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.tv.soaps (r.a.t.s.) from 1991 to 1993. Adopting the role of participant-observer, Baym catalogues 33,000 messages, undertakes a discourse analysis of the 524 posts surrounding one story line on the ABC soap All My Children, and conducts two separate surveys of r.a.t.s. participants. The study also features a longitudinal component in which Baym conducts two additional surveys in 1998. With much of the literature on the Internet being theory-driven, one of the unique contributions of this study is its focus on practice—its detailed and lengthy attention to the actual activities of users.

Though Baym is clearly more concerned with the content of the posts than their form and medium, she quotes them so extensively that the reader is actually able to distinguish unique personalities and sense the connection among r.a.t.s. members. Drawing on the data from the posts and the surveys, she sets out to identify the specific practices that define this community. In the course of identifying these practices, Baym convincingly deconstructs the stereotype of soap viewers as vapid, over-obsessed couch potatoes. The two key practices of r.a.t.s. members are identified in chapter 2 as interpretive and informative, and both practices are governed by norms of tolerance, friendliness, self-disclosure, creativity, and fun. Baym’s analysis of how these norms emerge and are sustained is both careful and insightful. One especially provocative observation she makes is that the norms of an online community may be connected to the nature of the text—soap operas—that brings members together in the first place. In other words, the norms of an “online” community may be partially a reflection of the textual features that appeal to an “audience” community.

In chapter 5, Baym considers how the participants in r.a.t.s. employ communal practices to perform individualized identities. Specifically, she suggests that the articulation of a coherent sense of self is a consequence of both identifying with and dissociating from others. Participants are continually defining themselves in their posts by quoting and responding to others’ posts. Thus, individualized identities are mediated by others and by the community as a whole. Baym further contends that one difference between r.a.t.s. participants and members of many other online communities is that, given the communal norms of friendliness and self-disclosure, r.a.t.s. fans tend to perform online identities that are consistent with their offline selves.

Having charted the intersections and contributions of Baym’s study to the literature on online identity, it is worthwhile to consider its absences. Absence does not necessarily equate to weakness, and indeed, many of the absences in Baym’s study seem to be self-conscious and strategic. Nevertheless, there are several things readers will not find. Based on my reading of Tune In, Log On, the author appears to be far more interested in generating a detailed description and analysis of a specific group of Internet users, than in identifying wider historical, theoretical, and political implications of Internet use. With regard to history, Baym ignores the question of, “why now?” The study is not situated or grounded in a discussion of the contemporary moment and there is no attempt to understand how the appeal of online community may be connected to larger socio-cultural forces such as fragmentation, or to the general anxieties associated with life in the Information Age.

Baym’s study of rec.arts.tv.soaps is also not concerned with the broader theoretical debates regarding identity, community, and technologies of communication. Though she explores in chapter 5 how r.a.t.s participants mark their identities through enhanced naming and signature files, she does not wrestle with concepts such as multiplicity and disembodiment, or place her observations in dialogue with the scholarship on postmodern or image-based models of identity. Likewise, community and fandom are treated unproblematically throughout the study. In fact, it is not clear how they differ, or how the differences that once existed between them may now be imploding. The study also spends very little time analyzing or speculating about how the Internet as a medium of communication is different from face-to-face communication and how that, in turn, may alter notions of identity and community. Baym does, however, in the closing chapter briefly critique this literature and suggest that too much has been made of the uniqueness of the medium of communication in Internet research.

Finally and not surprisingly, given the lack of concern with broader historical and theoretical matters, Baym is not positioned to draw any political conclusions based on her study. Since she neither historicizes nor problematizes the concept of community, for instance, her study does not contribute to discussions about the social and cultural consequences of online communities. Some researchers have suggested that because online communities are not bound by geography and allow members to opt in or out, they tend to attract like-minded individuals and thus promote ideological homogenization. The socio-political limitations of cybercommunity as well as online subjectivities are simply not a concern of this study. If you are deeply interested in soap viewers and particularly the nature of interactions that they have online, then Tune In, Log On is the study for you. If you are more interested, however, in the distinctiveness of the Internet as a medium of communication and in the theoretical issues raised by the medium for individual and collective identity, then I suggest you turn elsewhere.

Brian L. Ott is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Colorado State University.