Online communities, a fad?

While sites such as Facebook.com and Myspace.com have revolutionized online communities and the way in which we interact through new media, the novelty of these trendy online communities is wearing off.

Recently, media outlets such as the San Francisco chronicle have begun to focus on this phenomenon. In the Thursday, November 2, 2006 article titled “Social sites becoming too much of a good thing. Many young folks burning out on online sharing,” Ellen Lee discuses this phenomenon. She states that people just do not have the time to invest in these online communities anymore. While it was new, people spent hours connecting and customizing their pages but now they are realizing that there are other ways to spend their time.

Though one group of people may reduce their use of certain online communities, a new generation of users file in right behind them. These online communities enable students to bond and create a virtual network of friends that would be difficult otherwise. While these communities have their first signs of age, they are constantly adapting to the newest trends and will survive as culture evolves.

Boundary bridging/bonding

While some critics may claim that online communities are detrimental to physical communities, there is data that tells quite a different tale. Studies have found that online communities serve as a bridging and bonding agent in society. Bridging is defined as bringing together diverse people while bonding is the gathering of like people (Norris, 2002). While boundary bridging generally promotes diversity, bonding has the potential to create “social cleavages” (2002) which may bridge boundaries of ethnicity or gender but still separate them from other people with different beliefs or outlooks.

People in online communities generally look for people who reflect a similar disposition in life. This enables them to transcend other differences which in physical communities may cause a withdrawal. The internet removes the standard visual cues of social identity that often act as road blocks to communication. These social identities include age, socioeconomic status, gender, and ethnicity, to name a few. “Anonymity” (2002) is an important function of online communities in that it places everyone on an even playing field; you get to know the person, not the mask which they hide behind. While this heterogeneous group of individuals may bridge some of these barriers, there will always remain other barriers that will divide people. The great thing about online communities is that people get to choose which group they belong to, not based on where they fit into “society”, but who they actually are.

Refrences:

Norris, P. (2002). The Bridging and Bonding Role of Online Communities. The Harvard International Journal Of Press/politics 7, 3, 3-13. Retrieved Oct. 30, 2002 from SAGE Publications Communication Studies: A SAGE Full-Text Collection database.

Online and Physical communities: The issues.

Now that we have established that online communities are a powerful force in the formation of social reality, we will examine how online and physical communities work together. Many people currently insist that the Internet, new media, and online communities are negatively impacting society and creating a social rift in physical communities . While this view may, at first glance, seem valid and logical, there is little or no evidence that provides credence to this claim (Nip, 2004).

People that take this negative and oppositional attitude towards online communities have several loosely-based beliefs which they credit to online communities. People who cling to this oppositional view believe that new communities are called away from their physical communities to the internet (Lockard, 1997). This supposed abandoning of physical communities is referred to some as “virtualization of everyday life” (Doheny-Farina, 1996). Again, while on the surface this seems to make sense, there has been little substantial evidence of such claims. Critics of online communities also claim that the “solitary nature” of the Internet and online communities create a state of selfishness which further causes the abandonment of the physical community (Nip, 2004). With these claims, people who are resistant to online communities try to convey that participation in online communities cause a dilution of face-to-face communication in physical communities.

Though there have been cases of online gaming addicts who remove themselves from an online community due to an unhealthy addiction, national studies have revealed “…no statistical differences in participation rates in [physical] communit[ies]…” (2004). other reports show that some people have chosen online relationships over offline relationships (Nip, 2004), but surveys in the U.S. have shown no evidence of any reduced involvement in family or social realms (Nie and Erbring, 2000). Other surveys which study specific types of communication in relation to online communities show a correlation to a decrease in letter writing and telephone calls among online community members (Nip, 2004). While this may seem to evince a negative effect of online communities, more intimate means of communication such as “face-to-face communication, public addresses, [and] small group meetings” remained unaffected (2004) showing that online communities act as a substitute for some forms of communication but not a replacement or displacement of other forms.

Other studies, such as the follow up of the HomeNet project which was performed by Kraut et al., show that “greater use of the internet was associated with positive psychological outcomes” (Bargh and McKenna, 2004). Even more surveys have shown that members of online communities are “no less likely to call or visit friends”, and this gives further credence to Kraut and his colleagues’ findings (2004). Other studies have shown that members of online communities and frequent Internet users actually have larger social networks (DiMaggio et al. 2001).
While it is hard to find the true effects of the use of online communities due to the diverse findings of the different studies, there has been little or no concrete evidence to show that online communities are the evil which critics make them out to be. As the internet and online communities develop further, studies will continue to be conducted and we all can hope to better understand the true effect online communities have on physical communities.

Refrences:
Bargh, J and K. McKenna (2004). The Internet and Social Life. Annual Review of Psychology,55, 573-590.

DiMaggio P, Hargittai E, Neuman WR, Robinson Jp. 2001. Social implications of the internet.Annu. Rev. Sociol. 27:307-36 Economist. 2003a. Mar 29:58 Economist. 2003b. Apr. 5:58 Economist 2003c. Apr 26:58

Doheny-Farina, S. (1996) The Wired Neighborhood. New Haven, CT:Yale
University Press.

Lockard, J. (1997) ‘Progressive Politics, Electronic Individualism and the Myth of

Virtual Community’, pp. 219–32 in D. Porter (ed.) Internet Culture. New York:Routledge.

Nie, N. and L. Erbring (2000) Internet and Society: A Preliminary Report. Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society.

Nip J. (2004). The relationship between online and offlinecommunities: the case of the Queer
Sisters. Media, Culture & Society, 26, 3, 409-428. Retrieved Oct. 25, 2006 from
Cambridge Scientific Abstracts Communication Studies: A SAGE Full-Text Collection
database.

Online communities and their effects on social reality

Our culture centers its every thought on time and space; we have only so many hours in a day and we live by the ideology, “time is money”. Society’s perception of time and space changes as we grow from an agricultural society to an industrial society, and the shift into an information society has elicited a similar change (Gotved, 2006). Online communities have become a changing force in society and have caused some social waves. Time is no longer perceived as “…biological and chronological...[but] the sense of time is annihilated by the ever-faster communication technology used to compress and de-sequence it” (2006). Space is now “…one [that] flows, where the traffic between different kinds of networks constitutes a new relation between social practices and geography” (2006).

Boudreau and Newman introduced the triangle of social reality to identify the components of social reality (2006). This triangle consists of a base, social interaction, and two sides, culture and social structure.

With this model, we can see the interconnectivity between these three aspects of social reality and that the change in one affects the others as well. Culture is made up of “the ever shifting patterns of interaction, the common knowledge and the sense of a shared past.” (2006). The social interactions which we take part in through our communication in society provide a foundation for culture. If a specific type of social interaction occurs for long enough it has the potential to become part of the social structure (2006). The process is cyclical and interdependent, technology and online communities blur the lines because of the change in time and space and have a huge effect on the construction of social reality.

References:

Gotved, Stine. (2006). ‘Time and space in cyber social reality’. New Media & Society, 3, 467-486. Retrieved Oct. 25, 2006, from Cambridge Scientific Abstracts Communication Studies: A SAGE Full-Text Collection database.