Sunday Book-Thought 110

It is clear that any attempt to define the act of reading in a universal sense is misguided. What counts as an act of reading varies from place to place and time to time, according to the social and institutional circumstances of the reader. Any boundary that the researcher sets around the act of reading also has to be seen as porous, and in such a way that permits other participants to enter the act. In other words, individual instances of reading are always embedded in historically and spatially located cultures of print. And once we recognize that understanding the act of reading must take account of those social and institutional circumstances in which reading takes place, we can imagine readers as embedded in reading communities. That leap of the imagination in turn frees us to exercise our ingenuity in uncovering the multitude of details – those ‘distinctive traits’ of reading practices, and ‘the specific mechanisms that distinguish the various communities of readers and traditions of reading.’
– Christine Pawley, ‘Seeking “Significance”: Actual Readers, Specific Reading Communities’, Book History, 5 (2002), 143-160 (p. 157).

Sunday Book-Thought 92

What Wikipedia offers instead is the voice of a collective: not of the collective entirety of its millions of users, but of the hive mind composed of the many individual, fluid, and constantly evolving communities gathered around any one of its entries. Though composite, it is no less a voice which exhibits its own personal traits – and it is important that users of the site begin to understand the differences between the voices of individual collectives existing around specific pages in Wikipedia, and thereby learn to distinguish the credible, authoritative voices of fully formed issue communities from the vague, uncertain voices haunting the as yet less developed areas in the project.
– Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (New York: Peter Lang,  2008), p. 133.