Transcript Online Community

Online
Community
COM125: Intro to Internet
Spring 2007
What is community?
• A social institution, comprised of people
who identify as a group.
• Can be based on location or identity.
Changing notions of
community
• Sociologists have argued that the notion of
“community” has changed with the rise of
industrialism and cities.
• Gemeinschaft => Gesellschaft
(Tönnies, 1887)
• Ideas about “decline” of community.
Are we “Bowling Alone”?
• Putnam (2000) argues
that community and
public participation
has declined.
Are we “Bowling Alone”?
• Social Capital "refers to
the collective value of
all 'social networks' and
the inclinations that
arise from these
networks to do things
for each other”. (Putnam,
2000)
Are we “Bowling Alone”?
Social capital refers to:
• connections among
individuals
• norms of reciprocity and
trustworthiness that come
from social networks
• three dimensions bonding, bridging, linking
(Putnam, 2000)
Are we “Bowling Alone”?
• Emergence of social
capital is useful as a
conceptual tool for
examining various
communities.
“Third Place”
• Oldenburg’s (1991)
three essential
places:
– Home
– Workplace
– “third places”
• Community and civic
life is built in third
places.
“Third Place” example
• Starbucks uses the term the third
place in its marketing.
• The café section is often outfitted
with tables and comfortable
chairs.
• Free electricity outlets and
wireless internet access.
• Larger stores also host "miniconcerts" for local musicians.
The technology mindset
• What makes the internet different from
previous communication media?
• Presentism
the belief that present circumstances are not
connected to historical circumstances
(Wellman & Gulia, 1996)
The technology mindset
• Presentism is related to the problematic
question of history and moral judgments.
• For example: When writing history about
slavery in an era when the practice was
widely accepted, some believe that using
language that condemns slavery as "wrong"
or "evil" would be presentist, and should be
avoided.
The technology mindset
• Are virtual communities necessarily worse
than physical communities?
• Is there such a thing as a physical
community?
• What would be the online communities of the
1870s?
Utopian dreams…
• I found it full of twenty-four-hour
compassionate ears and souls. They not only
listened, they talked back. They helped. I
found myself keeping a kind of online journal
in the company of these people I'd never laid
eyes on. It seemed kind of miraculous, really,
this communion late at night in front of the
screen. (Catalfo, 1993, p. 167)
…and dystopian
nightmares.
• [R]ather than providing a replacement for the
crumbling public realm, virtual communities are
actually contributing to its decline. They're another
thing keeping people indoors and off the streets. Just
as TV produces couch potatoes, so on-line culture
creates mouse potatoes, people who hide from real
life and spend their whole life goofing off in
cyberspace.
(McClellan, 1994, p. 10)
Source: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/globalvillage/in.htm
Ties that bind
• Strong ties and weak ties
(Granovetter, 1973)
• Strong ties bind us to people who are like us
• Weak ties provide links to other social networks
• Major debate of internet community: Is it
possible to develop strong ties online?
Community
membership
• Costs of entry and exit
• New communities (weak and strong
ties) or neo-tribalism (strong ties)?
Virtual vs. “real life”
• Is “real life” a good distinction?
• Effects of online interaction on offline
communities
• Suggestion: Today’s community mediated to
greater or lesser extent by technology
• Privatization of community?
Virtual Communities
as Communities
Interest in virtual or
online community
• What is a virtual community?
• Who participates in a VC?
• Why is it important to understand how VCs
function? To whom is it important?
• What makes a community different from a
“social network”?
Consider this…
• Wellman and Gulia’s (1996) seven key
questions
Question #1
• Are relationships on the net narrow and
specialized or are they broadly based?
• What kinds of support can one expect to
find in virtual community?
Question #2
• How does the net affect people’s ability
to sustain weaker, less intimate
relationships and to develop new
relationships?
• Why do net participants help those they
hardly know?
Question #3
• Is support given on the net
reciprocated?
• Do participants develop attachment to
virtual communities so that commitment,
solidarity and norms of reciprocity
develop?
Question #4
• To what extent are strong, intimate
relationships possible on the net?
Question #5
• What is high involvement in virtual
community doing to other forms of “reallife” community involvement?
Question #6
• To what extent does participation on the
net increase the diversity of community
ties?
• To what extent do such diverse ties help
to integrate heterogeneous groups?
Question #7
• How does the architecture of the net affect
the nature of virtual community?
• To what extent are virtual communities
solitary groups, or thinly-connected webs?
• Are virtual communities like “real-life”
communities?
• To what extent are virtual communities
entities in themselves or integrated into
people’s overall communities?
Non-traditional online
communities