Virtual community

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A virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals. One of the most pervasive types of virtual community include social networking services, which consist of various online communities.

The term virtual community is attributed to the book of the same title by Howard Rheingold, published in 1993. The book, which could be considered a social enquiry, putting the research in the social sciences, discussed his adventures on The WELL and onward into a range of computer-mediated communication and social groups, broadening it to information science. The technologies included Usenet, MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon) and their derivatives MUSHes and MOOs, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), chat rooms and electronic mailing lists; the World Wide Web as we know it today was not yet used by many people. Rheingold pointed out the potential benefits for personal psychological well-being, as well as for society at large, of belonging to such a group.

Introduction

The traditional definition of a community is of a geographically circumscribed entity (neighborhoods, villages, etc). Virtual communities, of course, are usually dispersed geographically, and therefore are not communities under the original definition. Some online communities are linked geographically, and are known as community websites. However, if one considers communities to simply possess boundaries of some sort between their members and non-members, then a virtual community is certainly a community.

Early research into the existence of media-based communities was concerned with the nature of reality, whether communities actually could exist through the media, which could place virtual community research into the social sciences definition of ontology. In the 17th-century, scholars associated with the Royal Society of London formed a community through the exchange of letters.^[1] "Community without propinquity", coined by urban planner Melvin Webber in 1963 and "community liberated," analyzed by Barry Wellman in 1979 began the modern era of thinking about non-local community.^[2] As well, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities in 1983, described how different technologies, such as national newspapers, contributed to the development of national and regional consciousness among early nation-states.^[3]

Purpose of virtual communities

Virtual communities are used for a variety of social and professional groups. It does not necessarily mean that there is a strong bond among the members, although Howard Rheingold, author of the book of the same name, mentions that virtual communities form "when people carry on public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships".^[4] An email distribution list may have hundreds of members and the communication which takes place may be merely informational (questions and answers are posted), but members may remain relative strangers and the membership turnover rate could be high. This is in line with the liberal use of the term community.

Internet-based virtual communities

The explosive diffusion of the Internet since the mid-1990s has also fostered the proliferation of virtual communities taking the form of social networking services and online communities. The nature of those communities is diverse, and the benefits that Rheingold envisioned are not necessarily realized, or pursued, by many. At the same time, it is rather commonplace to see anecdotes of someone in need of special help or in search of a community benefiting from the use of the Internet.

Virtual communities may synthesize Web 2.0 technologies with the community, and therefore have been described as Community 2.0, although strong community bonds have been forged online since the early 1970s on timeshare systems like PLATO and later on USENET. Online communities depend upon social interaction and exchange between users online. This emphasizes the reciprocity element of the unwritten social contract between community members.

The embedding of virtual community in the experiences of everyday life and its reflection of and influence on the communication practices and patterns of identity formation make online community a colossal research enterprise which requires continuous investigation and theorizing.^[5]

Types of virtual communities

Internet message boards

An online message board is a forum where people can discuss thoughts or ideas on various topics. Online message centers allow users to choose which thread, or board of discussion, users would like to read or contribute to. A user will start a discussion by making a post on a thread. Other users who choose to respond can follow the discussion by adding their own post to that thread. Message boards are not conversation based because user responses do not have to take place right away. Whenever the user revisits the message board, he/she can make a response. Unlike a conversation, message boards do not have an instantaneous response and require that users actively go to the site to check for responses.

Anyone can register to participate in an online message board. A message board is unique because people can choose to participate and be apart of the virtual community, even if they choose not contribute their thoughts and ideas. Registered users can simply view the various threads or contribute if they choose to. Message boards can also accommodate an almost infinite number of users, something a chat room is limited to.^[6]

Online chat rooms

Shortly after the rise of interest in message boards and forums, people started to want a way of communicating with their "communities" in real time. The downside to message boards was that people would have to wait until another user replied to their posting, which, with people all around the world in different time frames, could take awhile. The development of online chat rooms allowed people to talk to whoever was online at the same time they were. This way, messages were sent and online users could immediately respond back.

The original development by CompuServe CB hosted forty channels in which users could talk to one another in real time. The idea of forty different channels led to the idea of chat rooms that were specific to different topics. Users could choose to join an already existent chat room they found interesting, or start a new "room" if they found nothing to their liking. Real time chatting was also brought into virtual games, where people could play against one another and also talk to one another through text. Now, chat rooms can be found on all sorts of topics, so that people can talk with others who share similar interests. Chat rooms are now provided by Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and other individual websites such as Yahoo, MSN, and AOL.

Chat room users communicate through text based messaging. Most chat room providers are similar and include an input box, a message window, and a participant list. The input box is where users can type their text based message to be sent to the providing server. The server will then transmit the message to the computers of anyone in the chat room so that it can be displayed in the message window. The message window allows the conversation to be tracked and usually places a time stamp once the message is posted. There is usually a list of the users who are currently in the room, so that people can see who is in their virtual community.

Users can communicate as if they are speaking to one another in real life. This "like reality" attribute makes it easy for users to form a virtual community, because chat rooms allow users to get to know one another as if they were meeting in real life. The individual "room" feature also makes it more likely that the people within a chat room share a similar interest; an interest that allows them to bond with one another and be willing to form a friendship.^[7][8]

Virtual worlds

Virtual worlds are the most interactive of all virtual community forms. In this type of virtual community, people are connected by living as an avatar in a computer-based world. Users create their own avatar character (from choosing the avatar's outfits to designing the avatar's house)and control their character's life and interactions with other characters in the 3-D virtual world. It is similar to a computer game, however there is no objective for the players. A virtual world simply gives users the opportunity to build and operate a fantasy life in the virtual realm. Characters within the world can talk to one another and have almost the same interactions people would have in reality. For example, characters can socialize with one another and hold intimate relationships online.

This type of virtual community allows for people to not only hold conversations with others in real time, but also to engage and interact with others. The avatars that users create are like humans. Users can choose to make avatars like themselves, or take on an entirely different personality than them. When characters interact with other characters, they can get to know one another not only through text based talking, but also by virtual experience(such as having avatars go on a date in the virtual world). A chat room form of a virtual community may give real time conversations, but people can only talk to one another. In a virtual world, characters can do activities together, just like friends could do in reality. Communities in virtual worlds are most similar to real life communities because the characters are physically in the same place, even if the users who are operating the characters are not. It is close to reality, except for the characters are digital.^[9]

Howard Rheingold's Study

Howard Rheingold's Virtual Community could be compared with Mark Granovetter’s ground-breaking "strength of weak ties" article published twenty years earlier in the American Journal of Sociology. Rheingold translated, practiced and published Granovetter’s conjectures about strong and weak ties in the online world. His comment on the first page even illustrates the social networks in the virtual society: “My seven year old daughter knows that her father congregates with a family of invisible friends who seem to gather in his computer. Sometimes he talks to them, even if nobody else can see them. And she knows that these invisible friends sometimes show up in the flesh, materializing from the next block or the other side of the world.” (page 1). Indeed, in his revised version of Virtual Community, Rheingold goes so far to say that had he read Barry Wellman's work earlier, he would have called his book "online social networks".

Rheingold's definition contains the terms "social aggregation and personal relationships" (pp3). Lipnack & Stamps (1997) and Mowshowitz (1997) point out how virtual communities can work across space, time and organizational boundaries; Lipnack & Stamps (1997) mention a common purpose; and Lee, Eom, Jung and Kim (2004) introduce "desocialization" which means that there is less frequent interaction with humans in traditional settings, eg. an increase in virtual socialization. Calhoun (1991) presents a dystopia argument, asserting the impersonality of virtual networks. He argues that IT has a negative influence on offline interaction between individuals because virtual life takes over our lives. He believes that it also creates different personalities in people which can cause frictions in offline and online communities and groups and in personal contacts. (Wellman & Haythornthwaite, 2002). Recently, Parsell (2008) has suggested that virtual communities, particularly those that leverage Web 2.0 resources, can be pernicious by leading to attitude polarization, increased prejudices and enabling sick individuals to deliberately indulging in their diseases.^[10]

See also

Further reading

• Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. (1983). Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. ISBN 978-0-86091-546-1. OCLC 239999655. http://books.google.com/books?id=4mmoZFtCpuoC. 
• Barzilai, G. (2003). Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
• Else, Liz & Turkle, Sherry. "Living online: I'll have to ask my friends", New Scientist, issue 2569, 20 September 2006. (interview)
• Ebner, W.; Leimeister, J. M.; Krcmar, H. (2009). "Community Engineering for Innovations - The Ideas Competition as a method to nurture a Virtual Community for Innovations". R&D Management. p. 39 (4), pp 342-356. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/search/allsearch?mode=viewselected&product=journal&ID=122535413&view_selected.x=67&view_selected.y=8. 
• Farmer, F. R. (1993). "Social Dimensions of Habitat's Citizenry." Virtual Realities: An Anthology of Industry and Culture, C. Loeffler, ed., Gijutsu Hyoron Sha, Tokyo, Japan
• Gouvêa, Mario de Paula Leite (18-21 July, 2000). "The Challenges of Building an International Virtual Community Using Internet Technologies". Internet Society INET 2000 conference proceedings. http://www.isoc.org/inet2000/cdproceedings/8j/8j_2.htm. 
• Hafner, K. 2001. The WELL: A Story of Love, Death and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community Carroll & Graf Publishers (ISBN 0786708468)
• Hagel, J. & Armstrong, A. (1997). Net Gain: Expanding Markets through Virtual Communities. Boston: Harvard Business School Press (ISBN 0875847595)
• Jones, G. Ravid, G. and Rafaeli S. (2004) Information Overload and the Message Dynamics of Online Interaction Spaces: A Theoretical Model and Empirical Exploration, Information Systems Research Vol. 15 Issue 2, pp. 194–210.
• Kim, A.J. (2000). Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities. London: Addison Wesley (ISBN 0201874849)
• Kim, A. J. (2004) (24 January 2004). "“Emergent Purpose. Musings of a Social Architect". http://socialarchitect.typepad.com/musings/2004/01/emergent_purpos.html. Retrieved 4 April 2006. 
• Kollock, Peter. 1999. "The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace," in Communities in Cyberspace. Marc Smith and Peter Kollock (editors). London: Routledge.
  • The author has made available an "Online working draft". http://www.connectedaction.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/2001-peter-kollock-economies-of-online-cooperation.htm. 
• Kosorukoff, A. & Goldberg, D. E. (2002) Genetic algorithm as a form of organization, Proceedings of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO-2002, pp 965–972.
• Leimeister, J. M.; Ebner, W.; Krcmar, H. (2005). "Design, Implementation and Evaluation of Trust-supporting Components in Virtual Communities for Patients". Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS). p. 21 (4), pp. 101-136. http://www.jmis-web.org/articles/v21_n4_p101/index.html. Retrieved 23 August 2010. 
• Leimeister, J. M.; Sidiras, P.; Krcmar, H. (2006). "Exploring Success Factors of Virtual Communities: The Perspectives of Members and Operators". Journal of Organizational Computing & Electronic Commerce (JoCEC). p. 16 (3&4), 277-298. http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a785829167~frm=titlelink. 
• Morningstar, C. and F. R. Farmer (1990). "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat, The First International Conference on Cyberspace, Austin, TX, USA". http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html. 
• Naone, Erica, "Who Owns Your Friends?: Social-networking sites are fighting over control of users' personal information.", MIT Technology Review, July/August 2008
• Neus, A. (2001). "Managing Information Quality in Virtual Communities of Practice; Lessons learned from a decade's experience with exploding internet communication". IQ 2001: The 6th International Conference on Information Quality at MIT. http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/neus.pdf. Retrieved 23 August 2010. 
• Parsell, M. (2008). "Pernicious virtual communities: Identity, polarisation and the Web 2.0. Ethics and Information Technology". Volume 10 Number 1. p. 41-56.. http://www.springerlink.com/content/p737755248127761/. Retrieved 23 August 2010. 
• Preece, J. (2000). Online Communities: Supporting Sociability, Designing Usability. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. (ISBN 0471805998)
• Rheingold, H. (2000). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. London: MIT Press. (ISBN 0262681218)
  • The author has made available an online copy
• Rosenkranz, C., Feddersen, C. (2010). "?". Managing viable virtual communities: an exploratory case study and explanatory model. International Journal of Web Based Communities. p. Volume 6, Number 1 5-14. http://inderscience.metapress.com/link.asp?id=j2888h3537761355. 
• Seabrook, J. 1997. Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace Simon & Schuster (ISBN 0684801752)
• Smith, M. "Voices from the WELL: The Logic of the Virtual Commons" UCLA Department of Sociology.
• Sudweeks, F., McLaughlin, M.L. & Rafaeli,S. (1998) Network and Netplay Virtual Groups on the Internet, MIT Press.
  • Portions available online as: Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 2
• Van der Crabben, Jan. "Performed Intimacy in Virtual Worlds". http://www.vandercrabben.com/?p=30. 
• Barry Wellman, "An Electronic Group is Virtually a Social Network." Pp. 179–205 in Culture of the Internet, edited by Sara Kiesler. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997. Translated into German as “Die elektronische Gruppe als soziales Netzwerk.” Pp. 134–67 in Virtuelle Gruppen, edited by Udo Thiedeke. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000.
• Trier, M. (2007) Virtual Knowledge Communities - IT-supported Visualization and Analysis. Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller. (ISBN 3836415402).
• Urstadt, Bryant, "Social Networking Is Not a Business: Web 2.0--the dream of the user-built, user-centered, user-run Internet--has delivered on just about every promise except profit. Will its most prominent example, social networking, ever make any money?", MIT Technology Review, July/August 2008

References

External links

• International Journal of Web Based Communities
• The Virtual School at Vanderbilt University
• Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) Regular Minitrack Virtual Communities