Case Study

This study explores the community that has developed around a real-time online chat with Washington Post humor writer Gene Weingarten, hosted at washingtonpost.com every Tuesday at noon. The chat, titled “Chatological Humor: aka Tuesdays with Moron” has been a regular feature nearly continuously since 2001, when it was titled “Funny? You Should Ask.” Community members refer to it simply as the Chat, notable especially for the fact that many are regular readers and commenters at other washingtonpost.com chats, from which and into which cross-referential discussions often emerge and develop. washingtonpost.com hosts dozens of chats every week, falling largely into one of four categories:

• regular occurrences with Washington Post writers and columnists. These tend to occur at the same time every week, and anecdotally any seem to attract regular readers but not, in the same way, a community as Chatological Humor has. Some others also have titles (e.g., sports columnist Michael Wilbon hosts The Chat House on Mondays at 1:15 p.m.), though others are more generically titled (e.g., Post Politics Hour, with a rotating stable of Post political staff writers).
• high-profile guest-hosted chats. These tend to be well-known politicians, writers, etc., and are almost always one-off occasions (e.g., Ask Martina Navratilova)
  
• long-feature-based chats. These are follow-ups on long-form pieces of investigative journalism and feature pieces, usually with the writer and/or subject(s) of the writing (e.g., Post Magazine: Object of Her Affection).
• event-based chats. Often hastily convened, these are outlets for immediate discussion of developing news stories, and are usually hosted by, it seems, whomever is available - the host is often not listed on the front page of the washingtonpost.com site, but rather simply the subject of the chat (e.g., “Putin's Push to Retain Power”). For events known in advance (e.g., elections) or that develop over several days, appropriate experts will often be brought in to host one of several chats on the topic.

When the Chat began in 2001, Weingarten was the editor of the Sunday Style section of the Washington Post print edition, which contained a weekly humor contest, the Style Invitational. The contest - begun in 1993 - is still ongoing, in its 742nd week. Each week features a prompt, and readers were invited to submit entries to be judged; the current contest asks for humorous replacements to clues for a specific crossword puzzle. Prizes for the current contest are described thusly (and are generally something along these lines):

“Winner gets the Inker, the official Style Invitational trophy. Second place receives this Over the Hill Size Long Bra pictured here, for use at your more boorish 50th-birthday parties. Its cups are two knit pockets that each could serve as a sheath for a long pair of scissors. It was donated by Loser Kevin Mellema of Falls Church, whom it no longer fits.” (Washington Post, December 2, 2007)

Mostly, though, the prize is getting one’s name printed in the paper associated with a clever retort, and a stable of regular winners soon emerged. The Invitational inspired large responses and enthusiasm - a dedicated community of readers and contributors - and even created controversy. The regular winners were, at one point, thought to be receiving preferential treatment for their entries, leading to a contest intended to prove the unbiased nature of the judging, where thorough steps were taken to anonymize entries - and the regulars were still disproportionately winners. These winners became, essentially, the characters of an ongoing collective narrative called the Style Invitational. Though identified only by (Name, City), they were instantly recognized and recognizable both for their names and their humor tendencies. The vanilla-named “Chuck Smith, Woodbridge” was the most noted and recognized of all, known primarily for his incisive scatological humor. As interest built in the contest and a community began to coalesce, a frequent contributor began to keep track of the results:

“Q: What is this all about anyway?
A: Back in Year 1, when Grace had appeared in the paper five times, she began to keep a spreadsheet to compare her performance with the other Early Losers. Remember Oslo, Tom Gearty, Bob Zane, and Dee Dee? No, we didn't think so. She soon stumbled across these and other Losers and began distributing that turkey to them weekly, by snail mail, for crying out loud. Al Gore invented the Internet just about that time, and upon the establishment of this site, the stats began to appear here. Now, of course, it's taken over her very being.”

“This site” refers to gopherdrool.com (the name a reference to an early element Style Invitational), the primary purposes of which are keeping track of the “stats” and identities of the frequent contributors (referred to above and in the community as “Losers” - the characters of the ongoing narrative); commentary on the contest; and a history of the contest and community surrounding it. The site is mostly maintained by the above self-referenced Grace Fuller, and also includes a wiki section (the “Loserpedia”) where members of the community can add elements of Style Invitational history. The site has modest but steady traffic (see figure 1) and links to a very active Yahoo! group (“losernet”) in its 10th year of existence (see figure 2). As Schaffer notes in her study of citizen journalism, “Lisa Williams of H2otown says... “Consistent effort by a small number of people is what makes casual contributions by a huge number of people possible.” (Shaffer 2007) [PDF]

Figure 1 - gopherdrool.com site 12-month traffic to December 2007

Figure 2 - losernet postings, by month, 1998-2007

Gopherdrool.com and losernet both support and instantiate the community that has arisen around the Style Invitational is their public archiving of and commentary on the contest.

As Preece notes, “...given sufficient time, people in closed textual discussion groups do form strong relationships.” (Preece 2000). This is certainly true in the case of the Style Invitational communities and, I will argue, also in the case of the Chatological Humor community.

In his capacity as judge of the Style Invitational, Weingarten was known as the Czar of the Style Invitational - one of the other, central characters of that ongoing narrative of community - and on the Chat references are still occasionally made to this character. And indeed there has also been a formation of a small regular group of regular “characters” in the Chat community. A few are generally referred to with their Chat nicknames, though most regular Chatters are also aware of their “real-life” identities. Late in 200e, Weingarten ceased judging the entries of the Style Invitational, and the new judge - the Empress of the Style Invitational - is also a regular reader, commenter and subject of the Chat, Washington Post copy editor Pat Myers. She is also a character on the Chat in another capacity, as the Chat’s resident grammar wonk, and she answers these questions as Pat the Perfect (PtheP, for short). The washingtonpost.com technical facilitator for the Chats, Liz Kelly, is referred to variously by her real name and her nom du Chat, Chatwoman. These characters and others are instantly recognizable in consistent utilization of the chat software - each question appears first with a bolded City, State, and then the text of the question, followed by Weingarten’s answer. Occasionally there will be an interjection from “washingtonpost.com”, which is Chatwoman/Liz Kelly. One norm that has arisen in the Chat is the clever use of the City, State formatting to convey extra or humorous meaning - thus, Pat Myers always appears as “Pat the Perfect, ME.” While this rule is stretched, regular Chatters generally consider it more clever to finish the question/word with the two-letter code pertaining to an actual state or province. Some frequent commentors are recognizable for their unusual and consistent geographic location - “Grand Rapids, Mich.” almost always means cartoonist Jef Mallet or his wife, and “Santa Rosa, Calif.” almost always means cartoonist Stephan Pastis. Indeed, this acknowledged familiarity can become a joke in and of itself'; from the December 4, 2007 Chat, an exchange on Weingarten's failure to produce a "Comic Pick of the Week" (another regular feature) for that Chat:

Totally anonymous, but maybe in Santa Rosa, Calif.: What kind of lazy butthead can't take five minutes to read three days worth of comics? You, sir, have set a new standard of indolence.

Gene Weingarten: Thank you, Stefan. I assure you that Pearls would not have made the cut anyway.

Less-regular but still-identifiable visitors include humor writer Dave Barry and cartoonist Berkeley Breathed.

This mode of play and identity in the Chat community is striking for both its similarities and dissimilarities to the norms of the Style Invitational community. They both fall under Preece's third pillar of online communities, "Policies, in the form of tacit assumptions, rituals, protocols, rules and laws that guide people’s interactions" (Preece 2000) but have at their core very different motivations and outcomes. While (Chuck Smith, Woodbridge) identifies a very particular person in a very particular place - who is known as that person within the community (indeed, was once the subject of a Washington Post feature) - other than "Gene Weingarten" there is no direct identification of individuals as individuals in the Chat. Even those regular characters tied to a particular signature - "Pat the Perfect, ME" - are known only to insiders. It's worth revisiting Haythornthwaite and Wellman here:

"...work and community networks are diffuse and sparsely knit, with vague, overlapping, social and spatial boundaries... computer-mediated communication has become part of everyday [life], rather than being a separate set of relationships.” (Haythornthwaite and Wellman 2002) [PDF]

The important point to note here is that in this model of networked individualism, identification of individuals is not necessary at all times. It is for the individual to identify with the community as being part of their community, and not necessarily with the individuals making up the community in a separate set of relationships. Recalling boyd, this simultaneously fits and misfits all the markers of a "networked public" - while the Chat is archived and thus persistent, searchable, replicable and accessible to invisible audiences, it is in some ways only accessible to invisible audiences. The community, while instantiated, is also invisible as individuals.

This could explain why the Chat community has, unlike the Style Invitational community, proven stubbornly tied to the Chat and only the Chat. A Yahoo! group in the model of losernet - Weingarten Chatters - was formed in November of 2005 and, after initial successes (the first month included more postings than any month of the 10 years of losernet), has proven a failed community (see Figure 3) despite the continued popularity of the Chat itself.

Figure 3, Weingarten Chatters postings, by month, 2005-2007

The interesting question is why this would be the case, and the answer lies in the nature of disclosure in the Chat. From the Chat FAQ (maintained at the washingtonpost.com site and linked from the Chat itself):

Q. What is the poll?
A. That is the other regular feature. Every week readers are asked to weigh in, anonymously, on all sorts of questions ranging from comics to geopolitics. Gene usually discloses his answers, too, with some notable exceptions: He never told us how much he makes, or the size of his penis. (Yes, the poll once asked male readers that question.)

The poll for the December 4, 2007 "Chatological Humor", for example, was on suicide. The poll, like many topics of discussion (including discussion of poll questions and results) relies on a level of information disclosure far beyond what many people reveal to their friends. This ties them more strongly to the community at the same time as it makes further instantiation of the community as a group of individuals nearly impossible. Preece again proves useful: “Online, trust is somewhat dichotomous: On the one hand, people feel freer to disclose personal details; on the other, lack of actual contact makes trust online fragile.” (Preece 2000)

The community around Chatological Humor is a community of sensibility, based on an ego-centric network centering around Gene Weingarten. While not exactly a cult of personality - it is just as much about the array of questions that he receives as his responses - it is unlikely that the community could survive his departure from the Chat. The failure of the Weingarten Chatters group - where Weingarten himself was not present - seems to support this. This stands in contrast to the Style Invitational community which, tied to "characters" that were in fact real people in real places, survived and continues to flourish years after Weingarten's abdication as Czar and replacement by the Empress. A cult of personality exists around her, too, to be sure, but the continuing success of gopherdrool.com and losernet attest to the robust nature of that community in several forms.

The broader lesson here is that community arises online in ways that cannot always be planned for, and coheres differently based on such simple things as whether participants are identified as (Name, City) or (City, State). It is also suggestive of the notion that online communities do exist in many ways not measured or studied in the broader typologies of online community research; further descriptive ethnographies of these marginal communities may yet discover elements that better explain their underlying elements.