Online Community I

Greetings, and sorry for the late post. I hope everybody had a wonderful weekend. I spent mine trying to find a job (you can see how excited I am with the prospect of leaving college in 40 days), and being OCD about about my Capitals and their quest for the playoffs. Anyway, that left me a little behind on the reading, so my apologies.

Our topic for this week is online communities. Our reading was slightly dated, making it a little difficult for me to get through as I continuously asked myself "Is this still relevant?" and "How well do these stats hold up today?" That being said, the reading did still bring up some interesting questions about online communities; particularly, are they communities?

By now we've come to take it for granted that an online community is actually a type of community, one where people of similar mindsets can gather without gathering (how post-modern), and share information and interact with each other.

The reading questions that logic by introducing theories that the homogeneity and the "lack of moral commitment" of online communities do not, in fact, make them communities. Challengers of the notion of online communities site the fact that they are easy to join and leave (just click and you're in!) and that a vast majority of the world's population doesn't have access to the internet, (my opinion... so? Most of the world doesn't have access to my neighborhood does that not make it a community?)

Then there's this argument:

A community is bound by place, which always includes complex social and environmental necessities. It is not something you can easily join. You can't subscribe to a community as you subscribe to a discussion group on the net. It must be lived. It is entwined, contradictory and involves all of our senses.

I don't even know where to start with that one, so I won't.

The reading continues to analyze the possibility of online communities by discussing the people involved and their behavioral norms, the relationships that are created through online interaction, the users' identity, etc. The reading does go on to realize that it may be a bit early to tell if online communities are really communities, ambiguously concluding that they are an "Emergent Community."

Now to the good stuff:

Questions for discussion and/or contemplation:

1) Is an online community really a community?
2) Why are some people so fearful of the notion of an online community?
3) What draws people to an online community? Similar interests? Boredom?

Oh, and did anyone catch South Park last week in its parody of the Writer's Strike? There was a great bit about stars from the internet such as Star Wars Kid and Dramatic Look Gopher (which is actually a prairie dog).

Also, the end of the episode tipped on our brief discussion of monetizing a business on the internet. The entire episode can be seen here. The scenes are available here and here.