[iDC] Participation in the Networked Public Sphere

[John Saccà]

2006/7/15, Trebor Scholz <trebor at thing.net>:
> However, in terms of contributions to a mailing list (to community
> value, collaborative research) of a geographically distributed group it
> is hard to see how listening (not posting) contributes to the group.

There are some mailing lists where I mostly listen and skim, partly
because I like some of what's posted and partly because every once in
a while, when the conversation turns to some subject that I know well,
I read more carefully, looking for errors or problems that I could
help with.  I post if I think it will help, otherwise I don't.  Even
if I post very rarely, I still think I'm doing useful work by checking
other people's posts.  Similarly, on Wikipedia, if I check an article
for errors and find none, and therefore don't edit the article, I
think I've still contributed to making Wikipedia more reliable.

Perhaps this kind of contribution is not often recognised as such
because it generally remains invisible, leaving no traces.

John