Theory

Jenny Preece in her pioneering study of online community formation (2000) identified four
major common elements of online communities thusly:

“An online community consists of:

• People, who interact socially as they strive to satisfy their own needs or perform special roles, such as leading or moderating
• A shared purpose, such as an interest, need, information exchange, or service that provides a reason for the community
• Policies, in the form of tacit assumptions, rituals, protocols, rules and laws that guide people’s interactions.
• Computer systems, to support and mediate social interaction and facilitate a sense of togetherness.” (Preece 2000)

These themes, basic though they may be, are worth keeping in mind when discussing online communities, and this paper will return to them in its analysis. Wellman and Haythornthwaite introduce an additional set of conceptual frames in their studies of the Internet’s impacts. They note that “the Internet has accentuated a change towards a networked society that had already been underway. Even before the advent of the Internet, there has been a move from all-encompassing, socially controlling communities to individualized, fragmented personal communities.” (Haythornthwaite and Wellman 2002) [PDF] This points toward a fuller fleshing-out of just what kinds of shared purposes people might have in their establishment of and engagement in online communities. Haythornthwaite and Wellman continue:

“The Internet has continued this turn towards living in networks, rather than in groups. In such networked societies, boundaries are more permeable, interactions are with diverse others, linkages switch between multiple networks, and hierarchies are flatter and more recursive. Hence, many people and organizations communicate with others in ways that ramify across group boundaries. Rather than relating to one group, they cycle through interactions with a variety of others, at work or in the community. Their work and community networks are diffuse and sparsely knit, with vague, overlapping, social and spatial boundaries. Their computer-mediated communication has become part of their everyday lives, rather than being a separate set of relationships.” (Haythornthwaite and Wellman 2002) [PDF]

This last point is an important one to keep in mind - the Internet in this conception is not conceptually some “other” space but a contiguous element of individuals’ day-to-day lives, fulfilling “interest[s], information exchange... [and] service[s].” (Preece 2000) boyd, however, does explicate ways in which some online spaces are functionally different from offline spaces in her conception of “networked publics”:

“These four properties thus fundamentally separate unmediated publics from networked publics:

1. Persistence: Unlike the ephemeral quality of speech in unmediated publics, networked communications are recorded for posterity. This enables asynchronous communication but it also extends the period of existence of any speech act.
2. Searchability: Because expressions are recorded and identity is established through text, search and discovery tools help people find like minds. While people cannot currently acquire the geographical coordinates of any person in unmediated spaces, finding one’s digital body online is just a matter of keystrokes.
3. Replicability: Hearsay can be deflected as misinterpretation, but networked public expressions can be copied from one place to another verbatim such that there is no way to distinguish the “original” from the “copy.”
4. Invisible audiences: While we can visually detect most people who can overhear our speech in unmediated spaces, it is virtually impossible to ascertain all those who might run across our expressions in networked publics. This is further complicated by the other three properties, since our expression may be heard at a different time and place from when and where we originally spoke.” (boyd in press) [PDF]
   

In the context of many online activities - especially those on OSNS - these four elements are part of the basic social fabric of online communications. Many online communities display all the elements of a networked public, and it can be argued that those elements contribute significantly to feelings of belonging and the richness of the community experience. But while most networked publics can be said to be online communities, not all online communities are networked publics. I will return to this point in greater detail in further analysis, but it is worth noting at the outset that there are some communities that exist - and that exist as placeful, vibrant communities to boot - not only despite but perhaps in part because they lack the kind of persistence, searchability, replicability and invisible audiences of networked publics, and that this lack may be a key element of a community’s shared purpose.