What is an online community?
This post is my submission for the Weeks 2-3 assignment for the Facilitating Online Communities course, which asks students to:
Write a post to your blog with your thoughts about the meaning of an online community and its uses. Include a list of identifying features that YOU would look for when assessing an online group or network for features which make it a community.
What is a community?
According to Wikipedia’s article on “Community“:
“The word community is derived from the Latin communitas (meaning the same), which is in turn derived from communis, which means “common, public, shared by all or many”….Communis comes from a combination of the Latin prefix com- (which means “together”) and the word munis (which has to do with the exchange of services), probably originally derived from the Etruscan word munis- (meaning “to endow”, or “to have the charge of”).”
The notion and nature of a community revolves around the holistic or aggregated elements and activities that make it up. This includes how individuals interact with one another as well as the motives that drive them to do so. Individuals arrive with their own objectives and interests, but the resulting community is characterised by something much larger than that, and arguably greater than the sum of its parts.
I see online communities in the same light. As the Wikipedia entry describes, communities are common, public, shared, and characterised by an exchange of some sort - be it knowledge, expertise, services, or support. The space in which community members congregate and interact is certainly different than communities in the more traditional sense; but the motives that drive the coalescence and resulting dynamic are much the same.
Additionally, of particular significance is the “sense of community” that McMillan and Chavis (1986) argue is characterised by four key elements: 1) membership, 2) influence, 3) integration and fulfillment of needs, and 4) shared emotional connection.
As quoted by Wikipedia, the study describes the development of a dormitory basketball team:
“Someone puts an announcement on the dormitory bulletin board about the formation of an intramural dormitory basketball team. People attend the organizational meeting as strangers out of their individual needs (integration and fulfillment of needs). The team is bound by place of residence (membership boundaries are set) and spends time together in practice (the contact hypothesis). They play a game and win (successful shared valent event). While playing, members exert energy on behalf of the team (personal investment in the group). As the team continues to win, team members become recognized and congratulated (gaining honor and status for being members). Someone suggests that they all buy matching shirts and shoes (common symbols) and they do so (influence).”
A critical aspect of this example is the individuals’ transitions from a focus on their own interests (”me/I”) to a sense of community cohesion (”us”). This, I think, is one of the core differences between collections of individuals that could be classified as a “community” and those that cannot and reflects the notion of a shared identity. Particularly in the online realm - especially in distributed networks - technical environments can include both communities and non-communities all in the same space - making it potentially difficult to draw hard lines to separate the two.
Online Communities
Unlike traditional communities in which geography is frequently seen as a common denominator, in the online realm communities frequently develop independent of geographical boundaries and can be found in a variety of different technical landscapes. Most commonly they fall into either centralised and distributed models, which refers to the space in which community members interact with one another.
In the case of the edublogging community this distribution is quite pronounced, with communication and collaboration occurring across countless sites including Twitter, Diigo, Ning, Delicious, blogs, wikis, discussion forums, mailing lists, email, instant messaging, and SecondLife.
In both the centralised and distributed models, the technical framework is a facilitating mechanism for group interaction. In the case of edubloggers, the common denominator is a shared vested interested in learning and teaching, as well as exploring the educational potential of emerging technology.
Familiarity and Shared Emotional Connection
The distributed model raises another important characteristic that distinguishes communities from non-communities: familiarity. This relates quite closely to the fourth element of McMillan and Chavis’s study concerning a “shared emotional connection” in that it incorporates emotional and psychological notions of identity and trust. Two individuals can share common belief systems and professional circumstances, but without a familiarity with one another it’s unlikely that they would develop a shared emotional connection.
Here it becomes clear that the existence of a network does not necessarily imply a community; nor are the two mutually exclusive. In the case of the population of edubloggers, the wider network contains a community within it - in fact it is more than likely that there are a series of communities. Edubloggers may possess a shared value system, a willingness to work towards a common goal, and occupy a shared space and, but won’t necessarily share the familiarity with one another that is critical for a true community.
Types of Communities
One possible reason for the existence of multiple communities within a shared network may be the in the differing objectives or focus of the members - and as such the overall purpose or use of the community. The Wikipedia article includes three examples of this:
- Geographic Communities
- Communities of Culture
- Community Organisations
Etienne Wenger introduces the notion of Communities of Practice (CoP) in “Communities of Practice: Learning as a Social System” arguing that “a community of practice is…different from a community of interest or a geographical community, neither of which implies a shared practice.”
Communities of Practice, Wenger indicates, are defined by three key dimensions:
- What it is about - its joint enterprise as understood and continually renegotiated by its members
- How it functions - mutual engagement that bind members together into a social entity
- What capability it has produced - the shared repertoire of communal resources (routines, sensibilities, artifacts, vocabulary, styles, etc.) that members have developed over time.
Each example above highlights the significance of context and agreed purpose in the development and lifespan of a community, and the reason why a single population of individuals can result in numerous niches and subcommunities - each of which caters to a different value system, need, demographic, geographc, or purpose.
August 13th, 2008 at 6:22 am
So - your blogging and getting credit for it? wow
One aspect of online communities that I often think about is not so much the similarities, but the differences. For example: I currently only use one online persona, or nom de blog if you prefer. Under that persona I comment on a variety of blogs ranging from professional, like this one, through to, well… lets just say edgy and eclectic and leave it at that. Comments that I make in one blog - say one dealing with weight loss and confidence issues would be inappropriate on this forum. However, through the power of google they can be associated and, like Obama found out wrt Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. - you may want to distance yourself form what other people say.
That can be a force that inhibits community
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Mike Bogle reply on August 13th, 2008 10:36 am:
You mean like the “creepy treehouse” phenomenon?
For the record, this quote from Flexknowlogy (”Defining ‘Creepy Treehouse’“):
One of my colleagues did an informal survey of his students to see whether this notion had any validity to it and a fair amount of them said “yes.” I can’t recall the statistics, but it does suggest that some areas - like school and private life - should be kept separate.
That said, as you say, when 3rd party tools like Google make it virtually impossible to separate your online activities, it raises some very interesting implications for online interaction in general.
Personally I’ve adopted a different attitude about it all. I have so many accounts on so many sites across the internet there is no way I can maintain any sort of anonymity, so I just behave under the assumption that people I don’t want to find me will anyway.
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