Virtual community

A virtual community, e-community or online community is a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as letters, telephone, email or Usenet rather than face to face. If the mechanism is a computer network, it is called an online community. Virtual and online communities have also become a supplemental form of communication between people who know each other primarily in real life. Many means are used in social software separately or in combination, including text-based chatrooms and forums that use voice, video text or avatars. Significant socio-technical change may have resulted from the proliferation of such Internet-based social networks.

The agglomeration of all online communities is sometimes called the metaverse.

Overview

The idea that media could generate a community isn't a new idea. In the 17th-century, scholars associated with the Royal Society of London formed a community through the exchange of letters. 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. 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.

The term "community", when used to describe virtual communities, is contentious in some circles. 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. The idea of neatly bounded communities is also being critiqued, since communities are fluid just as much as they are static, with members joining and leaving and even being part of different communities simultaneously.

The term virtual community is attributed to the book of the same title by Howard Rheingold, published in 1993. The book discussed his adventures on The WELL and onward into a range of computer-mediated communication and social groups. The technologies included Usenet, MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon) and their derivatives MUSHes and MOOs, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), 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.

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".

A virtual community still does not have a universal definition. 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. However, more than a decade of research has not supported Calhoun's arguments. (Wellman & Haythornthwaite, 2002).

Synthesizing the definitions might suggest that:

A virtual community is a social network with a common interest, idea, task or goal that interact in a virtual society across time, geographical and organizational boundaries and is able to develop personal relationships.

Different virtual communities have different levels of interaction and participation among their members. This ranges from adding comments or tags to a blog or message board post to competing against other people in online video games such as MMORPGs. Not unlike traditional social groups or clubs, virtual communities often divide into cliques or even separate to form new communities. Author Amy Jo Kim points out a potential difference between traditional structured online communities (message boards, chat rooms, etc), and more individual-centric, bottom-up social tools (blogs, instant messaging buddy lists), and suggests the latter are gaining in popularity.

Today, virtual community or online community is used for a variety of social groups interacting via the Internet. It does not necessarily mean that there is a strong bond among the members, although Rheingold mentions that virtual communities form "when people carry on public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships" [1]. 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.

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 days of USENET. Virtual communities depend upon social interaction and exchange between users online. This emphasizes the reciprocity element of the unwritten social contract between community members. Web 2.0 is essentially characterized by virtual communities such as Flickr, Facebook, and Del.icio.us. A similar trend is starting to emerge within businesses where online or virtual communities are taking hold. These communities can be organizational, regional or topical depending on the business. From a technical perspective, software tools abound to create and nurture these communities including Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, and Microsoft Sharepoint.

The ability to interact with like-minded individuals instantaneously from anywhere on the globe has considerable benefits, but virtual communities have bred some fear and criticism. Virtual communities can serve as dangerous hunting grounds for online criminals, such as identity thieves and stalkers, with children particularly at risk. Others fear that spending too much time in virtual communities may have negative repercussions on real-world interaction (see Internet addiction disorder).

The explosive diffusion of the Internet since the mid-1990s has also fostered the proliferation of virtual 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.

Membership life cycle for virtual communities

A membership life cycle for online communities was proposed by Amy Jo Kim (2000). It states that members of virtual communities begin their life in a community as visitors, or lurkers. After breaking through a barrier, people become novices and participate in community life. After contributing for a sustained period of time they become regulars. If they break through another barrier they become leaders, and once they have contributed to the community for some time they become elders. This life cycle can be applied to many virtual communities, most obviously to bulletin boards, but also to blogs and wiki-based communities like Wikipedia.

Legitimate peripheral participation

Lave and Wengers' theories on situated cognition can illustrate the cycle of how users become incorporated into virtual communities using the principles of legitimate peripheral participation. They define five types of trajectories amongst a learning community:

1. Peripheral – An outside, unstructured participation
2. Inbound – Newcomer is invested in the community and heading towards full participation
3. Insider – Full committed community participant
4. Boundary – A leader, sustains membership participation and brokers interactions
5. Outbound – Process of leaving the community due to new relationships, new positions, new outlooks

The following shows the correlation between the learning trajectories and Web 2.0 community participation.

Learning trajectory — online community participation

Example – YouTube

Peripheral (Lurker) – Observing the community and viewing content. Does not add to the community content or discussion The user occasionally goes onto YouTube.com to check out a video that someone has directed them to.

Inbound (Newbie) – Just beginning to engage the community. Starts to provide content. Tentatively interacts in a few discussions The user comments on other user’s videos. Potentially posts a video of their own.

Insider (Regular) – Consistently adds to the community discussion and content. Interacts with other users. Regularly posts videos. Either videos they have found or made themselves. Makes a concerted effort to comment and rate other user’s videos.

Boundary (Moderator/ Expert) – Recognized as a veteran participant. Connects with regulars to make higher concepts ideas. Community grants their opinion greater consideration. The user has become recognized as a contributor to watch. Possibly their videos are podcasts commenting on the state of YouTube and its community. The user would not consider watching another user’s videos without commenting on them. Will often correct a user in behavior the community considers inappropriate. Will reference other user’s videos in their comments as a way to cross link content.

Outbound (Legacy) – Leaves the community for a variety of reasons. Interests have changed. Community has moved in a direction that doesn’t agree with. Lack of time. User got a new job that takes up too much time to maintain a constant presence in the community. That and the YouTube culture seems to be drifting to a corporate commercial endorsement model rather than a social, grassroots platform that it once was. The Deletionist versus Inclusionist Controversy in another such case within wiki-based communities.

Increasing participation in virtual communities

Several motivations lead people to contribute to virtual communities. Various online media (i.e. Wikis, Blogs, Chat rooms, Internet forums, Electronic mailing lists) are becoming ever greater knowledge-sharing resources. Many of these communities are highly cooperative and establish their own unique culture. They also involve significant time from contributors with no monetary gain. Some key examples of online knowledge sharing infrastructures include the following:

• Usenet: Established in 1980, as a "distributed Internet discussion system," it became the initial Internet community. Volunteer moderators and votetakers contribute to the community.
• The WELL: A pioneering online community established in 1985. The WELL's culture has been the subject of several books and articles. Many users voluntarily contribute to community building and maintenance (e.g., as conference hosts).
• AOL: The largest of the online service providers, with chat rooms which for years were voluntarily moderated by community leaders. It should be noted that rooms and most message boards are no longer moderated, however.
• Slashdot: A popular technology-related forum, with articles and readers comments. Slashdot subculture has become well-known in Internet circles. Users accumulate a "karma score" and volunteer moderators are selected from those with high scores.
• Wikipedia: Wikipedia is now the largest encyclopedia in the world. Its editors, who voluntarily publish and revise articles, have formed an intricate and multi-faceted community.

Several researchers have investigated motivation in virtual communities. Studies show that over the long term users gain a greater insight into the material that is being discussed and a sense of connection to the world at large.

Kollock's framework

Peter Kollock (1998) researched motivations for contributing to online communities. In "The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace", he outlines three motivations (Kollock:227) that do not rely on altruistic behavior on the part of the contributor:

• Anticipated Reciprocity
• Increased Recognition
• Sense of efficacy

There is another motivation, implicit in the above, which Mark Smith mentions in his 1992 thesis: Voices from the WELL: The Logic of the Virtual Commons:

• Communion, as Smith terms it, or "sense of community" as it is referred to in social psychology.

Anticipated reciprocity

A person is motivated to contribute valuable information to the group in the expectation that one will receive useful help and information in return. Indeed, there is evidence that active participants in online communities get more responses faster to questions than unknown participants (Kollock 178).

Increased recognition

Recognition is important to online contributors such that, in general, individuals want recognition for their contributions. Some have called this Egoboo. Kollock outlines the importance of reputation online: “Rheingold (1993) in his discussion of the WELL (an early online community) lists the desire for prestige as one of the key motivations of individuals’ contributions to the group. To the extent this is the concern of an individual, contributions will likely be increased to the degree that the contribution is visible to the community as a whole and to the extent there is some recognition of the person’s contributions. … the powerful effects of seemingly trivial markers of recognition (e.g. being designated as an “official helper”) has been commented on in a number of online communities…”

One of the key ingredients of encouraging a reputation is to allow contributors to be known or not to be anonymous. The following example, from Meyers (1989) study of the computer underground illustrates the power of reputation. When involved in illegal activities, computer hackers must protect their personal identities with pseudonyms. If hackers use the same nicknames repeatedly, this can help the authorities to trace them. Nevertheless, hackers are reluctant to change their pseudonyms regularly because the status associated with a particular nickname would be lost.

Profiles and reputation are clearly evident in online communities today. Amazon.com is a case in point, as all contributors are allowed to create profiles about themselves and as their contributions are measured by the community, their reputation increases. Myspace.com encourages elaborate profiles for members where they can share all kinds of information about themselves including what music they like, their heroes, etc. In addition to this, many communities give incentives for contributing. For example, many forums award you points for posting. Members can spend these points in a virtual store. eBay is an example of an online community where reputation is very important because it is used to measure the trustworthiness of someone you potentially will do business with. With eBay, you have the opportunity to rate your experience with someone and they, likewise, can rate you. This has an effect on the reputation score.

Sense of efficacy

Individuals may contribute valuable information because the act results in a sense of efficacy, that is, a sense that they have had some effect on this environment. There is well-developed research literature that has shown how important a sense of efficacy is (e.g. Bandura 1995), and making regular and high quality contributions to the group can help individuals believe that they have an impact on the group and support their own self-image as an efficacious person.

Wikipedia is a good example of an online community that gives contributors a sense of efficacy. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia which uses online software to enable anyone to create new articles and change any article in the encyclopedia. The changes you make are immediate, obvious, and available to the world.

Sense of community

People, in general, are fairly social beings and it is motivating to many people to receive direct responses to their contributions. Most online communities enable this by allowing people to reply back to contributions (i.e. many Blogs allow comments from readers, one can reply back to forum posts, etc). Again, using Amazon.com as an example, other users can rate whether one's product review was helpful or not. Granted, there is some overlap between increasing reputation and gaining a sense of community. However, it seems safe to say that there are some overlapping areas between all four motivators.

Bishop's framework

A problem for providers of online communities is some of their members will not participate through posting messages. These members do not participate for a number of reasons, including that they believe they did not need to post and that they believe they are being helpful by not doing so. Other community members that have been participating for a long time, known as elders, regularly participate because they believe that their actions will have positive outcomes. Previous attempts to understand why community members participate or do not participate has suggested that individuals are needs-driven or goal driven. Maslow's Hierarchical needs theory has suggested that the reason lurkers do not participate is that 'lower needs' are not being met, or 'higher needs' are being met elsewhere and that the reason elders do participate is that they are meeting their 'higher needs'.

Theories that suggest that individuals are needs-driven and so-called needs are met in the order of a hierarchy are not suitable for online communities. It is quite likely that community members will desire to do two things at the same time, something that needs-based theories do not take into account. Theories that suggest that individuals are goal-driven are more appropriate for online communities as users will develop and change goals based on their interactions in an online community. However, these theories are not entirely appropriate for explaining why some individuals desire to participate in an online community, but do not actually do so.

Virtual community pioneer Jonathan Bishop proposed an alternative framework for understanding such behaviours (see Bishop, 2007), which is based on the principles that individuals are driven to action by desires, these desires lead to plans that need to be consonant with their existing plans as well as their goals, values and beliefs, and how they carry out an action will depend on their interpretation of their environment. Some online community members, such as lurkers, believe that they do not need to post messages to online communities or believe that they are being helpful by not posting. Such beliefs prevent these individuals from carrying out their desires to be social and participate in the community. Bishop argues that online community providers should attempt to change these beliefs, even if it creates a degree of Cognitive dissonance with the individual's cognitions. The use of persuasive text is the main means by which an individual's beliefs can be challenged, though providing alternative information to the beliefs that the individual holds whilst not being consonant with an actor’s goals. Challenging these beliefs may lead to the individual increasing their participation in online communities through allowing them to act out their desires.

Virtual community design

Below are some guidelines that can be of use when trying to design an online community or foster a better knowledge sharing environment in your organization:

Design Guideline	Contributor Motivation(s)
Trust the member’s input. Make it easy to contribute to your knowledge base and make it accessible to others.	Sense of Efficacy
Enable your knowledge base to evolve as processes and concepts change.	Sense of Efficacy
Allow the member to be known and get credit by measuring their contributions.	Build Reputation, Anticipated Reciprocity, Sense of Community
Allow other members in the community to measure and respond to contributions.	Sense of Community, Build Reputations

Online community virtuous cycle

See also: Metcalfe's law

See also: Bass diffusion model

Most online communities grow slowly at first, due in part to the fact that the strength of motivation for contributing is usually proportional to the size of the community. As the size of the potential audience increases, so does the attraction of writing and contributing. This, coupled with the fact that organizational culture does not change overnight, means creators can expect slow progress at first with a new virtual community. As more people begin to participate, however, the aforementioned motivations will increase, creating a virtuous cycle in which more participation begets more participation. It can be likened to a network, whereby the network's value is directly proportional to the square of the number of users it has. Many online community members describe their participation as "addictive".

The growth in community adoption is often forecast (that is, estimating the number of users in the community) by use of the Bass diffusion model, a mathematical formula originally conceived by Frank Bass to describe the process by which new products get adopted as an interaction between users and potential users.

Benchmark virtual communities

For examples of virtual communities, see: List of virtual communities.

Virtual community pioneers and experts

• Ron Baecker
• Danah Boyd
• Jonathan Bishop
• Bill Buxton
• Daniel Casal
• Lynn Cherny
• Bart Cilfone
• John Coate
• Julian Dibbell
• Vanessa DiMauro
• Randy Farmer
• Amy Jo Kim
• Peter Kollock
• Derek Liu
• Ted Nelson

• Rebecca B Newton
• Jenny Preece
• Sheizaf Rafaeli
• Howard Rheingold
• Philip Rosedale
• Marc A. Smith
• Les Squires
• Fay Sudweeks
• Marilyn Mantei Tremaine
• Sherry Turkle
• Long Vo
• Barry Wellman
• Nick Yee
• Mark Zuckerberg
• Jeff Lebow

See also

• Bulletin board system
• Chat room
• Computer-mediated communication
• Community of practice
• Discourse community
• GeoCities
• Internet activism
• Internet forum
• Internet social network
• Massively distributed collaboration
• Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games
• Network of practice

• Online deliberation
• Social network
• Social software
• Social evolutionary computation
• Video game culture
• The Virtual Community
• Virtual Community of Practice
• Virtual ethnography
• Virtual reality
• Web community
• Web of trust
• Yahoo! Groups

Further reading

• Virtual communities and domestic violence crimes committed by their users - A detailed discussion about whether popular virtual communities should be held legally responsible for online domestic violence crimes committed by their users.
• Liz Else, Sherry Turkle. "Living online: I'll have to ask my friends", New Scientist, issue 2569, 20 September 2006. (interview)

References and external links

• Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
• Barzilai, G. (2003). Communities and Law: Politics and Cultuers of Legal Identities. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
• Bishop, J. 2007. Increasing participation in online communities: A framework for human–computer interaction. Computers in Human Behavior 23 (2007), 1881-1893. Available online
• 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
• 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). “Emergent Purpose.” Musings of a Social Architect. January 24, 2004. Retrieved April 4, 2006 [2].
• Kollock, P. 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
• 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
• Morningstar, C. and F. R. Farmer (1990) "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat", The First International Conference on Cyberspace, Austin, TX, USA
• Neus, A. (2001). Managing Information Quality in Virtual Communities of Practice; Lessons learned from a decade's experience with exploding internet communication [3] IQ 2001: The 6th International Conference on Information Quality at MIT.
• 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
• 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: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol2/issue4/ Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 2
• Vanderbilt University. Communication in Virtual Communities. Virtual Communication Wiki

4: "Network and Netplay".

• Building Electronic Communities and Networks - free e-learning module on designing, developing and facilitating virtual communities.
• The International Journal of Web-Based Communities
• News Consumption in Online Communities
• Online Community Report - news and trends in online collaboration.
• 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. www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman [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. Saarbruecken, Germany: VDM (ISBN 3836415402).