Online Communities

I'd like to begin by defining the term online (or virtual) community, and I particularly liked the Howard Rheingold definition from the lecture:

He defines online communities as "social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on public discussion long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace" (Fernback and Thompson, 1995).

I liked this definition because it implies that communities are not just a collection of like-minded people discussing shared interests, but instead are groups of people discussing their interests with feeling and forming relationships - which may be just as 'real' as relationships formed in an offline world - and otherwise connecting with people on a potentially very deep level.

An important question raised when reading about online communities is: how do online communities organise themselves? We can first examine offline communities, where we see organisational capabilities limited largely by physical and geographical boundaries. In an online community these barriers are non-existent and we see a different form of organisation based on democratic participation, and a sense of shared social norms and values that are potentially drawn from the 'real' world and applied to the 'virtual' world.

Another topic explored this week was the reasons for joining an online community. Apart from somewhat obvious reasons such as connecting with people with similar interests, online communities provide a means to achieve a common goal - as seen in A Swarm of Angels, an open source project aiming to fund, create and distribute a film via the Internet.

But online communities can also facilitate interaction and the forming of relationships with people of a different background (race, ethnicity, economic, geographic, cultural), with whom you may not have otherwise conversed.

Or, as Terry Flew describes, the desire for strong communities "as an antidote to the sense of alienation and disenfanchisement seen as characteristic of modern, industrial, capitalist societies" (2004, 64). In other words, we look to the online world to fill a void that may exist in our offline lives.

Terry Flew also looks at online identities, seeing virtual communities as "a site of play and performativity through the creation of online identities more broadly indicative of the transition from modernity to postmodernity (2004, 65).

Terry's use of identities (plural) is important, as James Slevin notes (in Flew 2004 68): the tendency of most Internet users is not to commit themselves to a single community, but to participate in and move in and out of many different communities.

I personally prefer Sherry Turkle's theory (in Flew, 2004, p. 65) because it also explores the idea that the online world and the offline world are no longer separate but are instead permanently inter-connected. Turkle explains that the offline or 'real' world is merely one window through which someone can develop and express their personality. In other words, although the 'Phoebe' I am in an online world may be completely different from the offline world 'Phoebe', neither is a true and complete representation of myself but are instead fragments of my personality that when pieced together are the real Phoebe.



References

Fernback, J & B. Thompson (1995) Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?
Retrieved 3 April, 2008 from http://www.rheingold.com/texts/techpolitix/VCcivil.html

Flew, T. (2004) New Media: An Introduction, Melbourne: OUP