Alcoholics Anonymous Discourse and Members' Resistance in a Virtual Community: Exploring Tensions between Theory and Practice

Alcoholics Anonymous has greatly informed the individual, social, and political landscape of the contemporary self-help or mutual-aid movement. There has emerged, in turn, a vast, though largely uncritical, body of research examining AA and its 12-step recovery model. A close look inside a virtual AA community, however, reveals that not all AA members embrace formal AA discourse. Through an examination of dialogue and discourse on a public Usenet newsgroup, this study demonstrates that in contrast to research that depicts AA program practices as necessarily harmonious, members' experiences of program wisdom are frequently negotiated and reassessed outside larger AA dicta. The data examined show that what becomes constituted as members' practice can be fraught with questions, tensions, and separations from conventional or ideal AA.