"The term “virtual community” is used quite frequently. Some definitions of virtual community have become so broad that they essentially refer to any CMC group (Bieber, Engelbart, Furuta, & Hiltz, 2002; Evans, Wedande, Ralston, & van 't Hul, 2001; Falk, 1999; Kardaras, Karakostas, & Papathanassiou, 2003)"
What makes a virtual community? This is something which is dicussed quite alot in the extract, providing an interesting read. According to Jones, the "virtual settlement" has to be understood, the postings, structure and content. Blanchard and Markus (2003) note that a sense of comminity is neccessary for a virtual community, being an important characteristic. It is the sense of community which distinguishes a virtual community from mere virtual groups.
I think virtual settlement is quite a useful concept, as on the Blanchard reading is seems to have helped give theorists a better understanding of virtual communities. Virtual settlement allows a difference to be made between virtual communities and normal online groups.
Personally, I don't really get myself involved with virtual communities, so the notion of "sense of community" is something I have rarely come across or experienced myself. Af ew years ago I signed up to the Reading Festival forums, and I guess in a way this gave me a SOC , as the topics discussed were relevant to the music and the event. I wouldn't say I felt a strong sense of community, as I rarely posted, but the involvement with like minded people does make you feel part of a group, whether or not i felt part of a virtual community is a different matter. A belonging? I didn'y really feel like I belonged to the group or had any sepcial sort of memebership, it was merely just a place to check updates and discuss what bands we want to see. To an extent I guess there was a shared emotion, a shared feeling, as everyone was there for the same reason. Everyone was signed up to the forum because they were attending the festival. There wasnt really any sense of relationship of a shared history, more like discussions over memories and experiences.
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Yes Rachel, I think your description of most modern forums is correct. The "virtual community" promoters tend to over-claim for most online networked groups nowadays don't they?
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, Rheingold was talking about online forums/networks etc. that supported or grew into meatspace networks -with all the changes that that implies for ease of action and effectiveness of collabouration.
How do you feel about how you and/or friends use SNS (Facebook?) and the SOC it entails? Is it different to the festival site and your use of that? What might all this mean for the theory of virtual community?