E-sociability metaphors:From virtual community to social network

and beyond

AoIR Rethinking Community, Rethinking Place

Copenhagen, 16 October 2008

Marianne van den Boomen Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, NL

Virtual communities

"Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships" (Howard Rheingold, The virtual community, 1993)

• localized social aggregation on the Internet• based on shared practice, interest, or value • gathering at a collective place• having a core of recurrent active users • engaged in on ongoing group communication• and so developing a common frame

of reference

The community metaphor

Imagined community at a virtual space evoked by:

1) communication software (Usenet, IRC, web forums etc)

2) a strong metaphor: community (borrowed from a pre-modern

village)

Web 2.0: users, data, scripts

• participatory culture, user generated content, communities• contributing, linking, and sharing of semi-autonomous entities• cross-site platform: scripts, databases• patterns, clusters, issues, personal networks, groups• communities?

Web 2.0 communities?

• the page is dissolved as unit for collective gathering • on the fly aggregation and reassemblage of user enriched data • interacting data entities rather than interacting users • no common collective place of gathering• no ongoing debate between a recurrent group of users

Networks instead of communities?

• heterogeneous

• decentralised, distributed

• deterritorialized

• no a priori hierarchy

• no a priori structure

• no a priori space

Telegraph vs nerve network

• constructed • infrastructure• homogeneous• hard

• organic• feedback system• heterogeneous• soft-fluid

Network maps

Network: metaphor for any system in which nodes and relations can be distinguished:

cell metabolism - movie actors in films - results of search engines - citations in scientific journals - neighbor support -Internet routers - pages & hyperlinks - visitors & traffic – blogs & issues - people & social ties

This is not a network