Online Community: Is it really a village?

Berglund Authority Level 3

Pat McGregor <pat@hayseed.net>

There has been a lot of uproar about the nature of an online community called “MySpace” recently. One of the less harsh descriptions is:

It's a social networking site — sort of a cyber combination of a yearbook, personal diary and social club. […] With more than 50 million members, it’s one of the fastest growing Web sites in the country. [1]

MySpace is only one of thousands of cyber communities online. Some of them are centered on a specific topic, such as motorcycle racing, or the fans of certain writers, but frequently the people who participate regularly begin to talk about things beyond the initial topic, so that the core of participants know celebrate each other’s birthdays, anniversaries, paying off mortgages or getting a great low rate on a re-fi, share in hardship. In the “old days” of Internet news groups, some groups tolerated off-target conversation and some didn’t, but nowadays most users don’t know about “news groups” and their first interaction with online conversations are via a web interface, a mailing list,  or something like MySpace. The participants are all ages, but certain web venues tend to attract different age groups. MySpace seems to attract teens. I belong to a site called LiveJournal.

I think one of the reasons that online communities like MySpace are vulnerable to the kind of problems that have been publicly discussed (online predators, fraud, etc.) is that they can create strong online communities, where trust is created or assumed.  I think we should talk about the nature of online communities, so that we can understand how the relationships within the community work. Let’s discuss the two major kinds of online spaces: topical communities, where the focus is reasonably tightly defined and in general “side conversations” about personal topics is not appropriate; and “social networking sites,” which fit the definition I quoted above.

My son (17) has an account on MySpace, and also belongs to the user community for a role-playing game company. My daughter (27) has an account on a midwifery and childbirth support site. Both of them find their communities are a source of companionship and resources.

Topical Sites

The role-playing site, the Wizards of the Coast Community Forum, is pretty much all business. They talk about playing, the game systems, or creating gaming scenarios, or they engage in adventures online. (Think Dungeons and Dragons online, or chess by mail at a much faster pace.) If allowed, my son would spend ten or twelve hours a day engaged in online adventures, but it would require that all the other players also be online all that time. Since the players make moves and then the other players respond, the adventure doesn’t progress without people signing on regularly. Since the adventurers (called “the party”) can involve members from all around the world, it’s unlikely that everyone will be online at the same time for more than a few hours. So the time spent actually gaming is pretty much self-limiting. However, if the member is interested in the meta-conversation, the hows and whys of games, gaming rules, scoring systems, and so on, the discussion can go on for a very long time.

My son actually considers himself to be a member of a sub-group of the larger forum, a coherent gaming universe for a particular set of adventurers, many of whom have been in the community for several years. Within this subset, close friendships and a certain amount of non-game conversation takes place. (They have a special area where people can go to talk about non-gaming topics, since the “rules” for this gaming universe forbid out-of-character discussion.) From what I gather talking to my son, the community here is a lot like a real-world bridge or gaming group. People learn about (and from) one another, their style, their preferences in gaming or action, and have opinions on one another’s competence.

For example, my son has expressed that one person he occasionally goes on adventures with has very bad judgment about how to handle fights with large numbers of opponents. The way he talks about this person reminds me of how my grandmother used to talk about one of the women in her bridge club. “Never trust any no-trump bid she makes,” Grandmom used to say. My son feels the same way about how well this other player handles shooting arrows at opponents. He’s as likely to shoot the members of his party as the bad guys.

So this gaming forum has a fairly circumscribed area of conversation and scope. The depth of knowledge can be enormous (people who have memorized all the statistics about all the possible character types, for example, similar to fans of baseball statistics), and the flaring of tempers very likely, but the “world” is quite focused. If people get to be closer friends and want to talk about something outside of gaming, they do it in the “OOC” – the “out-of-character” area I mentioned.

My daughter’s midwifery and childbirth support venue is much like my son’s gaming community. Their scope is pregnancy, lactation, midwifery, politics around childbirth and the AMA, and so on, but the circumscription of the community is similar. Discussions about non-childbirth issues and topics will be taken to a different medium, such as phone or email.

Social Networking Sites

MySpace (http://www.myspace.com) and LiveJournal (http://www.livejournal.com ) are different. They really are like the Rialto[2], the Village Square, or a coffee shop. They are the place to go when you want to talk, tell jokes, share pictures, or get the news. For some people, who only read certain groups on these sites, they may be as topical as the ones we discussed above. But for most people, these Web logs (blogs) are as wide-ranging as the world itself. They are part diary, part cocktail party, and partly a place to publish one’s own opinions and discuss (or argue) them with others.

Looking at the first page of MySpace, you can understand why it appeals to teens. It’s very visual, with links to music videos, pictures of new members. Looking at the pictures, you can see that there are many young adults, too, but it seems the primary audience is teens. The other thing about MySpace is that it’s free. Those pictures for films, music, etc., are ads, and clicking to them is what keeps the service free for teens. They “pay” by buying the albums, movies, and books that are advertised.

LiveJournal has a different look, and a different model. Free accounts on LiveJournal have a lower level of service. The more you pay the more services you get. The very first page tells you that, as you can see below. It’s not surprising that fewer teens flock to LiveJournal.

(This is not to say that LiveJournal is dull to look at. Once you become a member, you can decorate your own page in lots of ways. For example, this is how my pages look.)

What makes a community?

During the hubbub about MySpace , a conversation I heard on a radio call-in show sent my thoughts down a new track. One of the callers stated that under no circumstances could a group of people talking together online form a “real” community. One of the topics I became interested in after college were the communities formed by women, in particular, who didn’t travel often but who wrote group letters to each other almost daily. This phenomenon has been known since the Fourteenth Century, but one of the best-documented communities was six Victorian women who started writing as teens and continued devotedly writing one another until old age, arguing and influencing each other’s political and social beliefs.[3] If letter writers could form real communities from the 1300’s through the Revolutionary War and up until at least the Victorian era, why couldn’t those folk interacting on the Internet be considered a community?

About this time I also received my updated LiveJournal MindMap, which is a graphic indication of who you talk to, who talks to you, and who their friends and readers are. Essentially, I believe it shows the “cloud” of community you exist in within the LiveJournal users.

Roughly, the larger the font used for a name, the closer you are to that person, and how important you are in their universe. The lines connect people who contact one another directly. As an example, I read ataniell93’s postings, but I don’t read all of her postings. Most of her postings are filtered by interests that I don’t share. So she is a small facet of my interest map, and I am a small part of hers. On the other hand, I read probably everything that cvirtue writes, and she mine. We loom large in each other’s minds[4].

The creator of this tool talks about the MindMaps showing both core groups of friends and the conscious decisions we make to become involved in one another’s lives. This is part of how we form communities in real life – we meet people through other people and expand our network of friends. Combined with the radio commentary, this made me even more curious about how people saw their online communities.

How does this community relate?

I started by asking questions on LiveJournal, in a very informal poll. I wanted to get data about how often people read and write in their journals, but expected that the open-ended questions and discussion afterward would yield the most interesting discussions. Asking about the base readership and their habits is a good way to get the conversation rolling.

I have about 20 people who regularly read my postings (and I theirs), and most of them answered the questions for me. Some invited their friends to answer also; I also contacted some people whose opinions I wanted but who don’t check in regularly.

First I asked how often people check into their Journals. All our respondents checked in at least three times a week, and 96% check in at least once a day. 70% checked the community between two and five times a day, and the other 30% always have their community open in a window or have a client that notifies them as soon as new content is posted.

Then we started talking about the more meaty topics, such as why do you write and where? There are many reasons why people post to their journals; not all postings come from the same motivation.

Why do you write in your journal? (Please pick all that apply)

I write for myself only

  2 (8.7%)

I write for myself, but I know other people read it

10 (43.5%)

I write primarily for myself, but I want other people to see it

  6 (26.1%)

I write primarily so that I can communicate with other people, even though I have other methods of contact easily available

13 (56.5%)

I write because otherwise I largely would be isolated from other people.

  7 (30.4%)

I write to publish my thoughts on the Internet

  1 (4.3%)

Half of the respondents wrote for at least two reasons; several checked off at least three reasons, and the most often checked as a third reason was to prevent isolation. I was surprised to see that only one person consciously intended to publish via the Internet (and it wasn’t who I expected :) ).

Do you write in more than one venue (i.e., Live Journal, My Space, CNN Responses, etc.)?

Yes

  8 (34.8%)

No

15 (65.2%)

Most of the folks who write in more than one venue write in a more topical space as well as LiveJournal – a professional or political forum, for example.

If yes, do you have different personalities (personas) in different communities?

Yes

  2 (12.5%)

No

14 (87.5%)

I was curious to see if people consciously changed their “voices” or personas writing in different venues.

It's said that on the Internet text lives forever. Even though most communities have some way of "filtering" who sees your entry, does the longevity of text on the Internet concern you? Do you worry that at some point someone will read something you wouldn't have wanted them to? (Choose all that apply.)

Yes

  6 (26.1%)

No

  8 (34.8%)

I believe that you should never put anything on line you wouldn't want your mother to read[5]

10 (43.5%)

I never thought about it.

  0 (0.0%)

Other (please respond in a comment)

  2 (8.7%)

There were only two comments regarding this:

  • And as for the "what if someone finds it?" question, I don't post things that I think might ever be a liability. In any of my filters.

  • On the question of Internet Text living forever - I am rather careful about what I post... (although I feel that not all of it is fit for my Mother's eyes, I am frequently surprised at just how open-minded she is for a lady in her 80's lol![6]...perhaps I would be more concerned about an employer though. As it is, I have a very nice boss with a great sense of humour, who does, in fact, read the unfiltered part of my blog when he is bored, I only wish I could persuade him to get an account on LJ - and there is nothing on it that I would worry about him seeing, particularly) but I do try not to post anything I may have to retract at a later time.

Are we real, or Memorex™?

After we got through all these questions, we settled in to the discussion about communities. One of the issues, as I mentioned before, was whether communities in cyberspace are “real” or not. There was a great deal of discussion about whether we actually become a community, or if our discussions in LiveJournal enable a group of people who already know one another in real life to communicate in much the same way as we would in person. (We distinguished this as facilitating a community rather than being a community.)

One very concise posting summarized the issue:

I can't necessarily answer that […], because I see multiple forms of blogs, and sites that host them.

Some places, like LiveJournal and MySpace, seem to be much more designed around a group of people interacting with each other, and the [postings] resemble diaries. Other places seem to be designed around a content creator pushing a stream of articles to the world, and the content creators will use them as a pulpit to espouse a view.

I think communities can form and be facilitated by both types of blogs. However, LiveJournal is much better at either forming a community (by having a bunch of authenticated[7] people rendezvous at a particular spot), or facilitating existing communities (mostly what it does for me, since a significant chunk of my friends from a few different communities hang out here).

I don't think communities are really driven by the posts, or the content creator making articles. Communities are driven by the conversation in comments (like we are doing now!)

We finally came to a question that seemed to help many of us decide whether a community was “real” or not. If the members of a discussion group that had come together on the Internet rather than having known each other in real life were close enough that the death of one of the members caused real grief among the participants, it was a real community. We included topical mailing lists, like the “Dunnetworks” list that Glee belongs to, or a support group such as a dieting support website. If an online community is formed or driven by the conversation and thoughtfulness, or even the sharing of humor and family events, then it doesn’t seem to matter what kind of communication facilitates it.

At its heart, though, I think a real community involves real friendships, where your life is noticeably enriched by same, or bereft if the friend goes away.

We decided that this was a true definition after discussing examples of support groups where that depth of feeling had occurred.

Communities that formed around people who knew each other already, such as family groups or members of hobbyist organizations, seemed to be in the middle space.

There were two notable contributions that indicate that LiveJournal is different than other blogs because of the free-flowing conversation and peer-like involvement.

If I might put in my 2 cents as an outsider who occasionally pops in, I think holyhippie[8] might have hit the nail on the head with LiveJournal communities versus standard blogging. Part of the essence of any "community" is involvement. I've never set up a LiveJournal account because I don't feel like I have the time to be that involved. I'm like the out-of-town visitor that drops in every now and again to catch up on the gossip from Pat and have come to recognize some of the names over the years.

I have been part of technical online discussion groups (message boards) where I have been known for contributions I've made but it is still not on the level of your discussions because they are too single issue focused. I don't believe that most [message board postings] are responded to by most of the readers, only in cases of exceptional agreement or disagreement. It's like reading a column in a newspaper. The level of interaction within the LiveJournal discussions is what brings them closer to the concept of community.

And this comment validated our conclusion that the depth of feeling that the long-term interaction created made the difference between a “community” and a conversation group.

In some ways, I agree with the position that on-line groups are "pseudo" communities. I think it's too easy to think we're getting to know people when we're really getting to know constructed facades. Similarly, it's easy to feel that we're giving things to a community when all we're likely to be called on to give is attention and text. The on-line communities I’m in that I feel are really "communities" tend to be shadows of real-life communities.

On the other hand, I've experienced one major exception to this pattern. It was a Usenet[9] group organized around a silly in-joke and a particular demographic. The people who were attracted by the premise evolved into something closely resembling a real community, resulting in a lot of in-person meetings and even a good few relationships. I personally ended up real-life-meeting close to 20 people from the Usenet group on various occasions, including getting crash space from members in London and Winnipeg, as well as picking up a short-term (albeit rather disastrous) girlfriend as a result of the list. And although I haven't really kept up any friendships from the group now that it's pretty much gone moribund, others have. (And I have a general problem with keeping up friendships with people I'm not bumping into on a regular basis.)

So I'd say it can go either way, but I think it's easy for the internet to give the illusion of community, and gives illusions more often than the reality.

Another respondent agreed: “Although I suppose I should also say that when I am skeptical about online communities, it's because I think there are a lot of people out there who are more sentimental than rational, and mistake casual companionship (bar buddies) for meaningful friendships.”

Powerful Connections

One of the issues that came up in the discussion was a tangential remark wondering about the general perception of the reality of online communities, or online movements, or even online political momentum such as we saw in the last elections. Certainly, everyone in the discussion felt that the Internet can create powerful connections, whether permanent or temporary. One reader said, “Denying that online connections can be some form of community is clearly a way for fearful people to deny the power of online interactions.”

We briefly discussed the 2004 March for Women’s lives in Washington, DC. That event, where over a million people came to DC and nine organizations worked together to organize it, used the online meeting coordination site Meetup.com (http://www.meetup.com). Many of the groups are still meeting regularly. Skeptics can pooh-pooh online dating sites and “soul-mates,” but it’s hard to deny a candidate who raises significant campaign funds through PayPal (http://www.paypal.com) or a million or more marchers who gather on the Washington Mall.

A “party-pooper” or toxic personality?

We have all experienced incidents where one individual either just doesn’t “fit in” and makes people uncomfortable, but is tolerated because the behavior is in general just annoying but not destructive. Alternately, there are people whose behavior is so upsetting to the majority of the group that it can disrupt a group completely. For example, an informal community works group I belonged to at one point completely disintegrated because the husband of one of the women was significantly emotionally abusive to everyone around him. As much as we liked the wife, the husband insisted on being present whenever she met with anyone else (even for lunch or a soccer game), and he was so unpleasant the whole group eventually just drifted apart.

Online communities can experience the same thing. Known since the early days of mailing lists and Usenet news groups as “flamers” (people who like to set conversational fires), these people generally cannot be restrained by either social pressure or technological means. One of our respondents said that we need to remember that even strong communities face the danger of dissolution “or outright sabotage by toxic individuals, which can definitely happen online, and maybe can happen more easily if there isn't a Moderator or some such person to protect them. “ Moderators, like classroom monitors, can screen postings before they are released to the general population. There was some general question whether a community that had to resort to screening, like suburban gated communities or people who screen all their phone calls via Caller ID or an answering machine before picking up, has too many barriers to the free flow of information to be a strong, invested online community.

How do we add new friends?

Finally, I was curious about how people made the decision to expand their group of friends. Adding even one new person can significantly increase the amount of time you spend reading. The reasons most add new people are that they find out they know the person in real life, or that the content the person publishes is engaging. One respondent said this most clearly:

Some people write interesting posts about topics I find interesting even though I don't know the person. I find lots of topics interesting, but interesting posts are the ones that either give me an insight into some world that I didn't already have, or make me think, or engage my speculative nature. Sometimes reading those journals leads to actual friendships; sometimes I'm just a voyeur.

Some people I know in real life and that gives me a connection to them that makes their posts more interesting. While I wouldn't read journals that consist entirely of "day in the life" posts from people I don't know (unless those lives are spectacular in some way), knowing someone automatically makes those posts more interesting.

And some people just write really well, and what they write about is less important. I can appreciate their posts as art, almost.

I generally don't read journals that consist in large part of quizzes and other non-content memes[10]. (I'm not anti-meme; I'm anti-"this tells me nothing about the person"-meme. I like the various interview-style memes.) I also don't read journals I find incoherent. In both cases, even if I know the person, if the journal itself isn't interesting in some way, I'm not likely to read.

Looking at the Mindmaps, you can see that groups can expand to a mind-boggling extent. In the maps, names with brackets around them indicate users with their own Mindmaps. Some of them are so complex that it’s hard to read them, or to follow the lines between interest groups. It’s hard to imagine anyone who does anything other than sit at the computer reading journals all day being able to keep up with the vast quantity of information.

I believe this is the reason behind the fairly strict rules the respondents in this discussion have evolved for adding new journals to their regular reading list. Just as we make decisions about whether to subscribe to more (or any) magazines, what clubs or activities we will participate in, whether to buy more books or DVDs, or to take more classes per semester, we have to make conscious decisions about how much information input we can handle. As one member of this community who is a home schooling mother of twins said, “I only add people when I find their postings are mentally challenging/expanding, and thus good for me. If I had an office job and not enough work  to do there, I'd probably be more ‘easy.’”

Conclusions

The question in the title of this essay wonders if online communities are like a village, and I’d have to conclude that they are. Some of the members of the larger group (the subscribers as a whole) form cohesive groups with strong friendships, while others come together for casual discussions, such as the sideline conversations at recreational soccer games. Groups can form for one specific activity, such as those who play on a darts team at the pub every Thursday night, and not have significant involvement with anyone else outside of that. Some people drop by the coffee shop on the way to school or to have a latte and read the evening paper after work. Groups can (and do) have jargon of their own. One member of a group can introduce a new member, and that person can become very significant part of the group. Some people associate only with family members and long-term friends, others are happy to explore the boundaries of other interests and dip into many sources of information. Some folks sit in front of the general store and know everything that’s going on, all day long.

In my experience, and through the discussions leading to this articles, I have found that many communities in cyberspace can provide as much support and friendship as friendships and groups in non-cyberspace. There is an absence of hugs, but families and friends who are widespread have the same problem. Frequent communication and a place to talk candidly, even to vent, is a way to provide an alternative. And we can provide that in cyberspace.

Did this article provoke any thoughts about online communities?
Come tell us about it at Glee & Pat’s Blog for our articles:
http://interface.nithaus.org/

[1] Rob Stafford, NBC News Website, April 5, 2006, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11064451/

[2] The commercial heart of Venice, much as the Forum was in Rome. For more details, see http://www.lonelyplanet.com/worldguide/destinations/europe/italy/venice?poi=22157

[3] Heineman, Helen. Restless Angels: The Friendship of Six Victorian Women. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1983.

[4] For more information on this tool, see http://community.livejournal.com/weblogsociology/1788.html

[5] Some of our respondents are the parents of other respondents. ;-)

[6] “Laugh Out Loud” in Internet shorthand.

[7] People whose identity is reasonably established. Since LiveJournal allows you to block anonymous commenters, or to prevent anyone who isn’t registered as your friend to comment, you have a reasonable control over who joins in your conversations.

[8] Screen name for one of our participants.

[9] From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://www.wikipedia.org): Usenet is a distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. It was conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979. Users read and post email-like messages (called "articles") to a number of distributed newsgroups, categories that resemble bulletin board systems in most respects. The medium is distributed among a large number of servers, which store and forward messages to one another. Individual users download and post messages to a single server, usually operated by their ISP or university, and the servers exchange the messages between each other.

[10] Formally, the term "meme" refers to any unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea or concept, which one mind transmits (verbally or by repeated action) to another mind. The first mimetic viruses on the Internet were frantic emails about non-existent viruses or hoaxes. When the recipient of the email sent it on to everyone they knew, the resulting flood of email clogged up networks and servers, resulting in a denial of service as effective as an actual piece of malware would have been. In Internet Blog terms, however, a meme is frequently an online quiz, a list of interview questions that the poster answers and then challenges others to also answer, or posting of a series of pictures. They can be a lot of fun or very silly; some of them are personally very revealing and lead to closeness between the respondents. For a satirical look at memes and blogs, see an Onion (an online humor magazine) article about how silly some young teen’s memes and journals can be, at http://www.theonion.com/content/node/46453 (topic: even pedophiles get turned off by bad spelling and exceptional vapidity).