Civic culture refers to cultural patterns in which the foundations for civic agency are embedded. Furthermore, civic culture highlights those features that serve as preconditions for people’s actual participation in the public sphere. The features in question Dahlgren has pointed out as six dimensions: knowledge, values, trust, spaces, practices and identities, all of which can serve as empirical entry points into the study of citizens’ engagement and participation. In this paper one of the key practices of civic culture will be examined, namely discussion. Taking on Putnam’s acknowledgment of non-political associations and networks, an internet community of sports fans is examined with regard to how the participants maintain the quality of their online discussion in order to warrant the survival of the conversation. The overarching aim has been to draw nearer to whether such endeavour potentially facilitates an informal learning of civic culture.

The data was drawn from a content analysis of 3993 messages posted to the hockey fan community HVfantasten.com  during 149 days, spread over three seasons of the Swedish Premier League of ice hockey. One of four grand subject matters on the agenda was the debate itself, i.e. a meta debate keeping a close check on the quality of the discussion by commenting on violations of the norms. This subject matter, consisting of 400 messages, constituted the basic data for the analyses.

Drawing on Habermas’ theory of universal pragmatics and McLaughlin’s et al conceptualization of netiquette, an analytical tool was constructed, distinguishing easy violations of the discussion standard from severe violations jeopardizing the basic foundations for common understanding. The distribution of critical comments on easy respectively severe violations was used  for measuring to what extent the maintaining of standard facilitates civic culture: emphasis on easy violations was perceived a low facilitating factor, and vice versa, emphasis on severe violations a potentially high facilitating impact on informal learning of civic culture among participators and readers in the sports fan community.