When we talk about an “Internet state”, one of the first, elemental things we think about is Community. The term community has two distinct commutative meanings:
1) Community usually refers to a social unit larger than a small village that shares common values. The term can also refer to the national community or international community, and
2) in biology, a community is a group of interacting living organisms sharing a populated environment.
How does this translate into an “Online community”?
Chiefly, an online community is a virtual community that exists in the context of the Internet (cyberspace) and whose members enable its existence through taking part in membership rituals and shared behaviors. It uses the architecture of interactions we find on the Internet. Developers of the architecture must keep in mind various cultural and other differences between people. He must also consider making the architecture adaptable to as many different aspirations that people have in order to cater to the broadest audience, whilst at the same time not making the whole system too complex for an ordinary user to use. At first, online communities were as seen as being quite different from “real-life” ones, mainly due to the perception, that it does not allow face-to-face communication, later on, we can tell, that people adapted to the architecture in a way, that interaction actually mimic the “face-to-face” communication.
According to Dorine C. Andrews, author of audience-specific Online Community Design, there are three parts to building a successful online community:
Starting the online community: when starting an online community, it may be more effective to create webpages that appeal to specific interests. Online communities with clear topics and easy access tend to be more effective.
Encouraging early online interaction: in order to gain early interaction by audience members, privacy guarantees and interwoven content discussion are very important
Moving to a self-sustaining interactive environment: successful online communities tend to be able to function self-sufficiently. Private discussion groups and information sharing can often add to the complexity success of online communities
We can find different types of online communities:
- Forums & Newsgroups: Where people post their thoughts on an individual topic or start a new discussion. A good example of that is “good old” 4chan forums, which allow for free posting by individuals, not requiring any passwords or signups. They are also renowned for allowing the old posts to delete themselves after a while, thus catering to the part of the users that do not want to see their posts being archived in a remote, inaccessible location.
- Social networks: Where people are allowed to interact with each other either mimicking “face-to-face” interaction, “one-to-many” or “many-to-many” interactions. We all use (even the writer of the blog) various social networks. Either it is Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or any other world-wide or local type of social network.
- Gaming communities: Games that attract millions of subscribers such as Warcraft generate lots of additional income for owners aside from just retail sales. It is a place where people nowadays experience a “rush” of competition against another human player.
- Online business communities: Sites like Amazon, eBay, Kickstarter, and many others allow people to acquire different products and services online, and is in the case of Kickstarter, crowd-fund various aspiring projects. It also allows people to feel the sense of a community when helping aspiring people with innovative ideas to find funding for them.
So what will the further development of such online communities bring us? With the addition of multimedia and wider accessibility of broadband Internet, we will see more options to bring back the good old sentiment of “face-to-face” interactions between people. We will also see a fusion of various upper types of online communities: so-called “Gamification” will have an increasing role in everything. It is an attempt to bring a taste of “gaming” into any other activities, no matter if they are online or offline. We already see “support forums” in gaming communities as a standard feature to improve sharing of information to achieve a better gameplay experience.