Virtual Communities: Cornerstones of the Web

A special note to readers: Many of these posts will be for a class project for my master’s degree. As such, if any of the public at large were to view, there might be some context missing. If you have questions, please leave them in the comments section below.

Virtual communities come in various shapes and sizes. The very idea of defining one to a single media is a problem. Does an IRC channel count as a community? Do instant messaging services or the near-ancient mailing lists count? What about the humble bulletin board that still retains a level of popularity for many hobbyist websites and discussion forums? Overall, the best way (I’ve found) to define a virtual community is a group that derives its purpose through their mutual communication on the internet. Yes, this is vague, but the relationships presented to us on the internet are equally vague. Take for example, the lurker archetype who travels from website to website, blog to blog reading content, but not contributing in any proactive way. Most of this archetype’s influence comes from the age-old pageview counters and metric website operators receive that translates into advertising. Beyond this, I think the best way to think of virtual communities is to break them down into three pieces: purpose, people, and programming.

Purpose

What is purpose? For a virtual community, it is the reason anyone comes to a website, service, or forum in the first place. For example, people regularly use Facebook to talk to friends and family. Before this, Myspace.com (and before that xynga.com) was the top social networking service, but this fell away for a variety of reasons (most of them discussed here: http://doteduguru.com/id3701-social-network-failure-what-happened-to-myspace.html). Even moreso, Renninger in Beyond Virtual Communities notes in chapter 1 the failure of MediaMoo, a MUD designed for teachers and researchers, occurring because of its founders not following technology trends and better purpose-driven services emerged. Perhaps the first rule of a successful website might be:

1.       Find a purpose and stick with it. Be something people need.

People don’t support ideas that don’t have any sort of benefit. If we’re to look at Linux for a moment, Linux languished for years until the Ubuntu distribution made GNU-Linux a viable product. There was always a rich community of Linux users, but Ubuntu has redefined that community away from the professional programmer and computer-hobbyist into an operating system that can be used by the normal end-user.

People

I discussed with my class the idea of, what is essentially, different levels of participation in different virtual communities. Many concepts such as leadership and participation (not the same thing) seem to define what many see as virtual communities. I would term this a functional philosophy of virtual communities; each person has a place in society. However, I subscribe to a conflict theory. There are two major groups on the internet: the owners and the users. I define this by their physical ability (or lack thereof) to influence a virtual community. A user can become popular, make content, and even have a social status equal to a civic leader in real life. However, for lack of a better term, owners are gods. At any time an owner feels it necessary, he or she might simply turn the server off and,”poof,” there goes the virtual community. Take the facebook outage of 2010 (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20025930-501465.html), no matter how many  friends or your influence in the Zynga (Farmville) gaming community could keep those servers up during that long thirty minutes.

The other distinction is that owners can apply rules, rules that must be followed sometimes with grievous consequences for disobedience. For example, an owner who runs an IRC channel can kick, ban, or mute community members with a touch of a button.

However, users also have power. As touched upon earlier, users have the power to leave, to go somewhere else, and to give the virtual community a bad reputation. This is an example of soft power. Sure, an owner could become a virtual despot, but honestly most of the community would leave for safer waters with that policy. The reason behind the Facebook.com outage in 2010 was a maintenance issue. It does, respectively, outline the differences in owners and users though.

Programming

Much of this I think I’ll touch upon later in the week, but briefly: the community is defined by its content. A news website is just that: a website that reports on the news. A video gaming website talks and writes about video gaming. Virtual communities always have a context and a lingo that they work in. Obvious, but imagine writing up a lesson method for a southern cooking forum to a cookie-baking podcast. Both exist in the same realm (cooking), but each has a different emphasis. Thus, a teacher or research needs to become fully aware of the cultural anthropology of a virtual community.

Final Thoughts

Honestly, it’s hard to squeeze everything about virtual communities into one post and I had a hard time thinking about communities without context. Whether my observations up to this point are simply conjecture or actual insight is hard for me to perceive. The internet is a vast place with communities numbering as many as the stars in the sky. But overall, I think the idea of virtual community is sound and would like to see it defined more.

Leave your comments at the bottom, please!