Covert Mentoring on the Internet: Methods for Confirming Status in Imagined Technical Communities

Many technologists rely on informal mentoring conducted in social circles that lie outside of their immediate workplace. One crucial mentoring method involves answering questions, which may help novices solve problems, master technical skills, and learn proper social behavior. Yet, asking and answering questions can mark the questioner and/or respondent as lacking knowledge or competence. Questioners and respondents may address these vulnerabilities by using strategies that deflect away from their perceived inadequacy and focus instead on the proper content and form of acceptable questions. Rather than focusing on the technical answer to a question, respondents criticize the questioner and teach questioners how to ask questions properly. These tactics strive to help questioners regain techno‐social capital that is lost when they cannot demonstrate adequate technical knowledge. Based on a two‐year ethnographic study of two online communities, this paper examines the strategies questioners and respondents use to ask and answer questions in ways coded as socially appropriate in local contexts. Rather than circulating new technical knowledge, these exchanges result in a type of covert and collusional mentoring which trains participants to ask and answer questions in socially acceptable ways. Ironically, these question‐and‐answer practices may encourage both questioner and respondent to use and reinforce normative cultural practices that no one may actually value.