Online Community: Is there a there there?

3 min read

Some interesting reading on online communities and what relationship (if any) they have to a person's offline, in the flesh communities.

On D'Arcy Norman's blog, he questions the role his online interactions play in his daily life, and whether his participation in online communities comes at the expense of decreased participation in his immediate surroundings. There are some great responses to this post, and the whole thread gives some nice grist for the mill for those of us who spend (too much?) time thinking about and participating in online communities.

While I've mentioned this article before, it bears mentioning again: Danah Boyd's recent talk on MySpace. Danah gives a good overview of how and why youth interact on MySpace.

For good measure, we all should check out the Pew Report on the Strength of Internet Ties. This report provides good data about the relationship between Internet and in the flesh communities.

Finally, Chris Sessums gives another wonderfully nuanced post; this time, his subject is the use of FaceBook among adolescents.

Last week, I was talking with some of my high school students about MySpace. They got on to the subject of the "Top Eight," a feature that allows a user to specify their top eight MySpace friends. It turns out that the Top Eight has sparked many fights -- one person removes another from their Top Eight, and the fight is on. As an observer, it feels a little like a mix between an extended chess match and an emotional shell game, but the squabbles resulting from these moves are real. In one case, they recounted how one of their friends broke up with another by removing them from their Top Eight, and changing their status to "single" -- no phone call, not even an email, just an "I broke up with you in 5 clicks" scenario. While these students highlighted the pathetic nature of this scenario, they all agreed that the resulting breakup, while lame, was still real.

And when I hear talk about online communities, I tend to end up here: they feel real. They don't feel virtual. While many online friends aren't friends in the offline usage of the word, people do form and foster real connections within these spaces. With the prevalence of MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Orkut, Xanga, etc, many of todays' youth have spent some time during their formative years participating in -- and being affected by -- online communities. As many people carry their offline friendships into their online communities, the argument that an online community is functionally different than an offline community ceases to have relevance. Both exist, and both offer people the opportunity to interact. The relationship between the offline and the online seems to be more a question about how we spend our time, and how these choices affect the tenor and quality of our online and offline frienships.