10.27
Our task for the next two weeks is rather paradoxical: we are supposed to conduct an ethnographic study of an online community. Problem is, it’s very hard to find two cyberculture theorists who agree on what an online community is; In “Community and Cyberculture” (a chapter off An Introduction to CyberCultures) David Bell gives an overview of the multitude of views available for consideration. Some theorists see online communities as an expression of our need to associate and belong (a need amplified by modern disembeding, detraditionalisation and globalization), an effort to reclaim a virtual gemeinschaft. At the other end of the spectrum, there are those who claim that the notion of an online community is in essence a consensual collective fantasy or hallucination, conjured specifically for sheltering its members from the contamination of pluralism found in real life. And let’s not forget those who think that the term itself suffers from increased conceptual meaninglessness, as –whether we intend to or not– we cannot fail to belong to some form of online community or other.
In light of this apparent inability to agree on what a community actually is, I thought it might be useful to collect various characteristics of an online community as proposed by various theorists in Bell’s and Rheingold’s texts.
* Bell, D. (2001) “Community and cyberculture”, chapter 5 of An introduction to cybercultures. Abingdon: Routledge.
* Rheingold, H. (2000) Introduction to The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. London: MIT Press.
“a consensual collective fantasy or hallucination” perhaps the same could be said of rl community, or indeed culture itself.