What is a Community?

Bell talks about the issues surrounding the intersections of “real-life” (RL) and online life, and the problem of defining a community in the broader context. Bell also refers to Tönnies’  notion of “Gemeinschaft” (Tönnies 1955 in (2)) – a definition of community which seems, to me, to be out of date even in real life where multiple changes to society including separation of living, working and social spaces, migration, etc. – mean that communities are no longer where “everyone knows everyone, everyone helps everyone, and the bonds between people are tight and multiple (someone’s neighbour is also their workmate and the person they go drinking with and their relative, etc.)” (2) . Pitched against this is Tönnies’ contrasting notion of an urban “Gesellschaft”, where relationships are shallow and instrumental. Bell indicates the nostalgia inherent in drawing such a comparison and, indeed, the role that such nostalgia around idealized views of what constitutes a community plays.

Bell connects these views of what may constitute a community to Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities” (1983, quoted in (2)) that are maintained by constructed symbols and traditions. I think this is a very useful definition which helps when considering Bell’s questioning of whether groups with shared interests or in specific online spaces constitute real communities. Bell also refers to Rheingold’s views on the value of online communities for the individual, that there is human hunger for community and this is also translated to the online space. However his view that online communities fill the space left by the demise of real life communities is less convincing to me. Finding like-minded people online may be easy – as Rheingold suggests – but by being able to pick selectively on the basis of a single shared interest you still only share one perspective with these “like-minded” types and it can take a long time to find out that you may be part of a community where others may, say, share your love of certain film or fandom for a football team or cooking interest but may also be someone who may have, say, wildly differing political or religious or simply hold radically oppositional views on other topics. The good and bad thing is that connecting to new people via the internet often gives you exactly what you expect at first but that doesn’t mean you ONLY get what you expect. As in real life a shared interest can open the door to sharing other interests or views or subjecting you to new understandings of the world, or it might mean that some friendships are untenable when shared interests are not enough to overcome a serious difference of opinion that you do not discover at first. I would argue that in real life you are far more likely to seek out communities who look, sound and live near you – so share class, income, possibly political and religious views – than online where a single interest is often enough to start a relationship that takes you past what might be a initial barrier on the basis of presentation, accent, or other contexts in real life. But I think the simplicity of people is the same online as offline – no-one is the same and if you only want to hear viewpoints that match your own that is often easy to do in either space.

And following on from this I really like Rheingold’s definition of cyberspace community:

In cyberspace, we chat and argue, engage in intellectual intercourse, perform acts of commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose them, play games and metagames, flirt, create a little high art and a lot of idle talk. We do everything people do when they get together, but we do it with words on computer screens, leaving our bodies behind. Millions of us have already built communities where our identities commingle and interact electronically, independent of local time or location.

(Rheingold 1999: 414, quoted in (2))

Community vs Subculture

The type of arguments Bell explores around what defines a community, and how a sub culture may differ from there, are crucial to my own choice of community or the digital ethnography. Torchwood Tweeters are perhaps both a subculture and a community – as I explore further I feel that some members participate in each context, some overlap both definitions – but it is a tricky boundary to consider. Sardar (CR: 743 quoted in (2)) seems to take too hard a line on communities by suggesting that it is simplistic to suggest that a shared interest makes a community using the example of the world’s accountants. Actually I think the worldwide population of accountants is, in some respects, a valid community as they shared experiences of specific types of work, they have interests in similar areas of legislation and working practice, they are likely to share business-specific suppliers and contacts – software vendors, payroll companies etc., they will share terminologies, jargon and communications. Crucially that means they will be able to understand and bond with each other in a way that outsiders may not. That does not ensure that every accountant could, would or should richly interact with every other accountant on the planet but the sense of a community of interest is at the very heart of making communications and sharing tools like international journals, shared products and product user groups, conferences, standards etc. work. However this is an opt in/out sort of community (as opposed to, say, a village where location of premises may be the entry rather than participation in that community) and thus fits into Baym’s characterization of communities being real only when participants “imagine themselves as a community” (1998, quoted in (2)).

Bell talks not only of these ideas of conceptual or imagined communities but also of the role of “social codes” in making communities. I think to this I would add that shared opinions is important and that these can often be conflated with social codes in online spaces. I think it is interesting that the Torchwood Tweeters recent activity has been around sharing dominant views that the death of the Ianto Jones character was wrong – either because it is unfair on the actor, because it upsets the balance of the show, because he is a popular character who they will miss… the reason is not important but the sharing of the view that this plot development was not correct is a key part of the shared #Torchwood experience. Also crucial to the current discussions in this space are some assumptions around who will be interested in communicating over the series: fellow tweeters on the #Torchwood hashtag will have watched (and hold opinions) on the existing series’ and will not object to multiple stories of viewings at different timelines – for instance looking just now I can see people talking about series 1, series 3 and a  possible series 4 all in parallel. The viewing and enjoying of the series is shared but, whilst no live broadcasts are scheduled, there is an accepted  practice of reruns and resharings.

Voices of dissent or acts or invasion in online communities are complex. Bell (2) says that:

“Elizabeth Reid’s (1999) work on adventure MUDs refers to the prominence of public displays of punishment there as a return to ‘Medieval’ forms of social control, reversing Foucault’s (1986) famous discussion of the historical move from punishment to discipline – an analysis at odds with the supposed ‘freedom’ on offer in cyberspace.”

And certainly I see some relationship with this symbolic and accelerated level of anger and, say, the number of complaints registered about Jan Moir’s Stephen Gately article last month. Indeed the MUD experience discussed by Julian Dibbell (1999, quoted in (2), and which I commented on elsewhere) puts in mind my own experience of being part of a “kd lang Mailing List” which experienced several crucial community-gelling experiences when it was decided to take collective flaming action upon people posting offensive homophobic and/or sexist comments to the list. In retrospect the group action was disproportionate to the offence but the impact of receiving offensive comments and feeling subject to voyeuristic impostors exposed the fragility of the community (effectively just a set of email addresses) and thus provoked a strong protective reaction.

Bell’s discussion of transgressions in Habitat also recalls more recent press coverage of Second Life gangs and crimes and World of Warcraft gold farming. What distinguishes the virtual crimes in Habitat from those in SL or WoW is that the latter spaces are commercialized and therefore real money is bound to the virtual world transforming crime from a virtual issue to one potentially requiring RL resolution through the legal system. This perhaps helps explains the various shifts online from imaginative play spaces to more RL type social spaces – when virtual interactions are commoditised it becomes more important to be able to confidently trust the identity of those you may be exchaning real money or goods with (indeed eBay is one of the most intriguingly complex spaces for social interaction, trust and etiquette). Which is not to say that anonimity is not possible or desirable in current cyber communities but more to indicate that I feel that the acceptability of anonymity is currently in a state of flux. The internet has also become a business space and networking in this context is usually most effective when under a professional name or consistent pseudonym (in a way Second Life is smart to allow only certain names – they encourage users to adopt wholly new unique pseudonyms for the space thus protecting their RL identities). That might mean that one may eventually want 2 or 3 names for different online communities or that people eventually treat online spaces like RL – you are usually yourself but you might play a part for a night or act differently in a more permissive space.

Arguments against Online Communities

Bell draws on Robins’ (in (Bell and Kennedy 2000), quoted in (2)) concept that thinking about cyber communities must be contextualised by the real world . This is one of the reasons that as part of my own digital ethnography of the Torchwood tweeting community I will be trying to give a visual idea of the geographic context of tweeters  – I think there may be relationships between locations and the type of participation they play in the community, not least because this particular community is gathered around a cultural experience that comes with specific set broadcast/release dates and interactions in the community are mediated by participants real life access to materials, experiences and awareness of Torchwood activity/news some of which is released globally, some of which is released in different localities at different times (leading to tensions over, e.g. plot spoilers).

More alarmingly Bell also talks about Kroker’s idea of Bunkering which, to me, seems to be overly simplistic in it’s criticism of the possibility of online communities. I do accept that you can exist on the internet without ever dealing with other people – you can shop, game, and enjoy interacting with information-rich spaces and you can even publish your own unidirectional website espousing your own ideas (whether to a mass audience or just yourself) if you so wish. But to engage with others online is not to crave distance from people since people do not suddenly behave like machines just because they are using a keyboard or digitally encoded audio or video to mediate their thoughts and feelings. Those with physical intimacy fears or phobias may certainly gain freedoms by being able to speak to someone at a distance but I think there are many more people who benefit from being to make contact with a sort of community peer who can provide support of some kind despite living in quite separate geographical or class or cultural areas from physically local RL peers.

To suggest online communities replace RL interaction is to suppose that there is always going to be a suitable peer group available in RL. I think the popularity of the internet and community driven sites among those living in quite remote rural locations, and the importance of the internet to, for instance, the lesbian, gay and (the much more niche and still fairly misunderstood) trans communities indicates that not only is the internet a less risky way of approaching and discovering possible RL peers but also a way of letting super-niche groups (for instance teen trans people) locate information and contact peers on a global scale. The odds of being the only one or anything in a village is high, less in a town, less in a city, and so when magnified to a global (english speaking?) community you are, no matter how niche your interest, feelings, sexuality or health condition, likely to find peers and support. I think the increased visibility of niche groups in society at large is, in part, due to the raising of confidence that ensues when one is able to see one is not alone but is in fact represented online by other people like you and that there is an acceptance beyond what can be closed minded, small or simply homogeous communities. Indeed small mindedness or a sense of being under perpetual surveillance is the flipside – as Bell notes – of the nostalgia inherant in  Tönnies’ “Gemeinschaft”.

Indeed it is a fairly odd example but cinematically I think the film “Pleasantville” offers a fantastically interesting sense of dischordant nostalgia: for all the safety and cosiness of a world where everyone knows each other there is a dark side to a community that does not recognise change or difference and conceptualises itself under traditionalist terms that opress, whether explicitly or tacitly, minority visibility, viewpoints or merely freedom of expression. Whilst Pleasantville is intentionally very stylized and grounded in fantasy and does not portray behaviour or personal types that would remain controversial today (there are not gay characters, the film does not touch on issues such as abortion, and race is tackled mainly through metaphor) it does show the sense of fright and persecution that follows a minority of characters becoming self-aware about their place in the world and the difference between their own feelings and those of their peers. They break the social norms and expectations and they break the imagined idea of what their community looks like leading to a sense of fragility, backlash and a troubling need to re-negotiate and conceptualize what the imagined state of community might be in the Pleasantville community.

Such a portrayal of 1950s America, drawn very much from televisual ideas of normality (which are often bizarre when shown in abstraction), contrast starkly with a film like “Back to the Future” which, despite attempting to draw on some of the same themes, has it’s roots more clearly in nostalgia and the virtues of Gemeinschaft. Difference is not really engaged with and the lack of divorce, disruption of family life, and romanticised views of pre-feminist womanhood are all seen as virtues rather than potentially stifling limitations. Where change is presented it is in the sense of discovery and niave exploration. The exploration of the fear and isolation possible in a close knit community is overlooked in favour of portraying a warm sense of nostalgic community where every key person in a life are, rather improbably even in a small community, educated at the same high school at the same time.

I think Pleasantville offers a compelling rebuttal to Kroker since one does not automatically retreat to a “perfect” unreal world online; instead one often retreats to a world which is recognisable and tangible to the self. That world may be have overlap with RL, or simply be an extension to it (e.g. online communities like Gaydar, which significantly focus on seeking RL sexual experiences) but the online world is often of greatest value when the connections made online differ substantially from one’s nearest RL experience of community where flexibility or access, choice or negotiations of entry to specialist groups may all be harder to realise. So for a gay teenager a supportive online community may be an escape from their peer group at school – with whom they may have little in common – but it is not a matter of fleeing people or reality, more a matter of making contact with others who will understand their place in the world and who they can disclose their real identity to in relatively low risk.

Having been at the closing night of a long running LGBT social group this week I can confirm that there are still people in their late teens or early 20s who badly need to connect to a community before they feel able to come out to friends and family – so they need to have some addition or alternative to RL in order to reflect on their sense of self long enough to feel able to go back and confidently re-engage with their RL community and, perhaps, find new RL communities of support. The internet can either be a direct bridging mechanism to find the locations and meeting times of a RL community or it can merely be a way to confirm that, to someone in the world, your status is normative enough to feel confident about. There are of course other groups to which this applies, I am just fixed (as Bell seems to be) on the LGBT community as I have had most personal experience of these communities. I also have RL friends in the local LGBT community where I live now but as a 17 year old living in a rural village there was no RL way to test my sense of self at low risk whilst the online LGBT community allowed me to meet long term friends and confidantes at a time when that was extremely valuable.

I feel strongly that arguments suggesting that participation in online communities simply embodies a means of hiding from differing views also undermines the complexity of human opinion – sharing one type of view does not mean that individuals will share all views (as I’ve already mentioned above). I do like Hetherington’s ideas of neo-tribes and the concept of Bund but I am not sure it is necessary to be as careful of the use of the word community as some of those quoted by Bell suggest. I think there is more weight to Wellman and Gulia’s (1999, quoted in (2)) suggestion that one sees “online life as city life; or, more accurately, as living ‘in the heart of densely populated, heterogeneous, physically safe, big cities’” – there may be areas of like minded people but you are moving in many communities and individuals are, well, individuals as well as participants in their communities. I also fully agree that one cannot entirely talk about total heterogeneity since not all people will be present online – there are indeed inherent exclusions of access and understanding (Slevin 2000 quoted in (2)) and unintended inclusions/exclusions of audiences (Stone in (2)), but it is hard not to see this as an extension to the existing divisions in RL. There may not be explicit rules of conduct for many RL spaces but there are infinite implicit rules and expectations that those in socially excluded groups, those that do not meet aesthetic standards, or those without financial freedom are unlikely to meet. It would be nice if the online world was more accepting than this but it is perhaps not realistic to expect online communities to behave exactly unlike RL communities when the people who populate online spaces are also, inevitably, the same people who participate in the physical world.

References

N.B. These reference are for this block of work – the vast majority of references are to article (2) by David Bell.

1. Hine, C (2000) The virtual objects of ethnography, chapter 3 of Virtual ethnography. London: Sage. pp41-66
2. Bell, David (2001) Community and cyberculture, chapter 5 of An introduction to cybercultures. Abingdon: Routledge. pp92-112 [e-book] [PDF]
3. Rheingold, H (2000) Introduction to The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. London: MIT Press. [web site]
4. Gatson, S and Zweerink, A (2004) Ethnography online: ‘natives’ practising and inscribing community. Qualitative Research, 4(2), 179-200.
5. Clari, M (unpublished, 2009) A Flickr ethnography.
6. Michael Wesch’s Digital Ethnography blog [web site]
7. Gillen, G (2009) Literacy practices in Schome Park: a virtual literacy ethnography, Journal of Research in Reading, 32(1), 57-74.
8. Chan, A (2008) The Dynamics of Motherhood Performance: Hong Kong’s Middle Class Working Mothers On- and Off-Line. Sociological Research Online. 13(4). [web site]
9. Bardzell, S and Odom, W (2008) The Experience of Embodied Space in Virtual Worlds: An Ethnography of a Second Life Community. Space and Culture 11(3), 239-259.