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What factors condition the discharge of hostility in cyberspace? What behavioral strategies are adopted by Internet users to deal with the potentially disruptive effects of flaming upon interpersonal relationships? How are they different from their off-line counterparts? Based on ethnographic observation of a Usenet newsgroup, this article investigates the characteristic features of flaming and the conflict management style in the group. It identifies behavioral patterns that group members developed to cope with flaming (e.g., withdrawal, offering apologies, denunciation, posting poems, mediation, showing solidarity, joking, ritualizing, normalizing). This study also finds that the blurring of geographical boundaries online makes political discussions more inflammatory, and the hybrid of asynchronous written and spoken communications facilitates the creation of new forms of conflict style (e.g., posting poems). Online participants, through adopting the strategies of ritualizing and normalizing, tend to consider flaming as an unfortunate but quite acceptable category of interaction in virtual space.
Hangwoo Lee (Tue,) studied this question.