Creating a Virtual Academic Community:
Scholarship and Community in Wide Area Multiple-User Synchronous Discussions

from Computer Networking and Scholarly Communication in the Twenty-First-Century University
SUNY Press

Synergy and "Thought-Coming-Into-Existence"

The exploratory nature of the medium makes it ideal for collaboration and invention, for testing new ideas, for capturing thought as it comes into being --- before the critical consciousness has a chance to kick in and censor the statement that might, with further consideration, have seemed too odd to utter. Because of the sheer pressure to enter into the conversation or not be heard, participants must think on the fly, inventing at the edge of consciousness and possibility. In so doing they may stumble upon truths and ideas they might have cast off in the highly reflective self-consciousness of the "solitary writer crafting sentences" scenario. If they permit these utterances to fly out, others may see in them ideas the original writer had not foreseen, and build upon them. In so doing, the participants collaborate to bring thought-structures into being through writing. As such, the natural heuristic effect of rapid oral interaction can influence the invention process of a conversation that is also a written document.