Baym’s thesis is that fans can create an online community and a rich social environment  through their discussions and interpretations of the story lines of soap operas. Baym says this occurred on r.a.t.s because members share common meanings, practices and identities. She also documents some of the interpersonal relationships that members of the group formed.

Since Baym is a participant in the group as well as a researcher, one wonders if her enthusiasm may sometime cloud her judgment. From the very first page when Baym describes how she was introduced to the joys of watching soap operas, through the last chapter updating readers on how (r.a.t.s) has developed since the time of her initial study, Baym enthusiasm for her subject translates into some very entertaining reading and her personal involvement helps her readers understand why this subject is worth considering.

However, Baym never really provides readers with a well-defined working explanation of an online community and the line between herself, other individual participants, and the interaction of the group as a whole, is sometimes confusing. While the author states that an audience of fans can be transformed into a community of fans, she includes onetime posters, lurkers and frequent contributors in this category, and this definition of membership is too inclusive. Is feeling as if one is a member of a community enough of an explanation to make it so?

Baym argues that her book is an attempt to fill a void in computer mediated communication scholarship. As she asserts, there is little empirical work being done that documents the process of building community online, over time, and even fewer studies that attempt to characterize an audience of fans that participate in online discussions from an interpersonal perspective. In this regard, Baym presents numerous examples of dialogue that support her argument that r.a.t.s is a meaningful community for its members.

Baym concludes the book with a chapter that describes how the characteristics of r.a.t.s have changed due to the popularity and accessibility of the Internet. She describes how the Usenet group has adapted to some of the changes due to the vast increase in its popularity, but most of the members who participated in the original study, no longer contribute to the discussions. Although Baym contends that the community still exists albeit in another form, she is not very convincing. When Baym began to monitor the discussions taking place in the r.a.t.s., the group was much more exclusive, simply because most people didn’t have access to Usenet at the time, and definitions of membership and audience and even community may not have been as important as they are now. While Baym’s research may not prove to be entirely comprehensive, she does make a strong case for analyzing online discussion groups from a perspective that is less dependant on the characteristics of the medium than on the characteristics of the interactions of the participants as individuals and as members of a collective group. Existing research in this field has only begun to scratch the surface and Baym’s book provides an ample array of material that imaginative researchers may want to consider.

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