In my opinion, this kind of flaming rarely shuts down the conversation unless it degenerates into the first kind of flaming. Lurking Lurkers are subscribers to electronic forums who rarely or never send contributions to the discussions, content to read what others are writing. This refers to text whose units proceed non-sequentially. It is a computer phenomenon, but a good analogy would be footnote markers, which when encountered, invite you to jump out of the sentence you're currently on and to visit the note at the bottom of the page. A key concept in hypertext is that the user determines reading order.
Hypermedia is a broadening of the term, and encompasses text, graphics, sound, and movies.
It differs from multimedia in that users generally make more of the choices as to the order of presentation. Less involved virtual spaces might involve graphics on a flat screen, or even textual descriptions of places like MOOs. Somewhere in the middle is VR which avoids the helmets and gloves, but provides high-quality video which multiple viewers may share. These participants might meet in a chat program or through e-mail or in a MOO to share their reading notes and their papers. They might never meet face to face.