Has This Book Been To More Countries Than Me?

I’ve been an active user of Bookcrossing.com now for about two years and the social norms of the webpage still fascinate me. Bookcrossing.com is an Internet community of people who love to read and are willing to share books. The basic rule of Bookcrossing is: take a book, register it on the web page to get a BCID, write what you think about the book and pass it on to someone else.

Bookcrossing has a forum, which consists of several message boards. This section of the web page operates like a standard message board with the Leviathan being the operators of the webpage (Humankind Systems, Inc.). They remove messages and/or delete accounts of anyone posting harmful or threatening messages as well as spam. This behavior is pretty standard and understood in Internet communities today, but there are some unique behaviors that occur in Bookcrossing. The social norm in Bookcrossing that requires an enormous amount of trust and salience from the users is the “book rings.” This is where a user will set up a list of people (on a volunteer basis) that want to read a book that they own. The user mails it to the first person on the list, that person reads it, journals about it, and sends it to the next person and so on until it’s mailed back to the person who started the “book ring.” Bookcrossing.com does not maintain, control, or enforce the rules of the book rings this responsibility is left up to the community at large. It has become a Bookcrossing standard over the past seven years that a user should only have a book for two weeks. If they keep it any longer they are considered a “staller.” When this user tries to sign up for another book ring, undoubtedly another user who frequents the message boards or is active in many book rings will identify the staller.

Social Presence Theory predicts that people can not build trusting relationships in CMC. The lack of face to face interactions and social cues make it hard to judge someone. The book ring model is a vast contradiction of that because users trust complete strangers with their home address. With having no personal information about a user except their thoughts on the book, users are willing to give out their address.

SIDE predicts that when a group identity is salient and the individual is visually anonymous, conformity will be at its highest. This theory does hold true from my experiences with book rings. When the members of the group are all very active Bookcrossing users who value being a member of the web page, the ring works exactly as planned. People are courteous with the amount of time they keep the book and if they feel they will not be able to read it at that time they request to be moved to the bottom of the list. This is in full compliance with the unspoken rules of the book ring. Likewise when book rings includes users who are “stallers”, the dynamic shifts to the individual identity being more salient causing the model to fail.
Wallace says that in order for groups to work effectively in an online community there must be enthusiasm for the final product combined with a steady social presence. This coincides with the SIDE theory. As members of the book ring journal frequently about the book that is being passed around the social presence increases. This creates value for the members as it gives them a common experience causing increased group identity and saliency.

With the lack of a single Leviathan for book rings there are cases where people break the “rules;” I think an interesting further study would be to examine several book rings and track their success and the amount of time they took to complete. It would also be interesting to sign up for several book rings and break them to see exactly how the community at large would deal with the user.