The paper Virtual-Communities, Virtual Settlements & Cyber-Archaeology: A Theoretical Outline discusses virtual community at an abstract and theoretical level. I recapitulate some points relevant to my research:
The goal of this paper is to clarify the notion of virtual community. To do so, the author defines the term of virtual settlement and the characteristics of virtual settlements.
Virtual settlement: the place (or cyber-place) where a virtual community forms. The relation between virtual community and virtual settlement can be analogous to the relation between the act of cognition and observable behavior. The existence of a virtual settlement demonstrates the existence of an associated virtual community.
Characteristics of virtual settlement (necessary condition)
1. interactivity: requires long-term, meaningful conversation
Meaningful communication requires not only the messages exchange bilaterally but later messages refer to earlier ones.
2. communicators: requires more than two individuals
Communicators are necessarily human, excluding human-machine communications.
3. virtual common-public-place
An area of cyberspace consists of one or many virtual settlements. The boundaries of a single virtual settlement can be examined by (1) interactive communication and (2) symbolic division via topic of discussion.
4. sustained membership: considers the density of exchanging messages and the stability of membership
For above characteristics, we can ask: does the virtual settlement under study have a large but unstable population? Or is it small and cohesive?
Characteristics of virtual community
1. Form-dependent: the interactive form provided by the technology affects the behavior of virtual community.
The behavior of virtual community relates to the message system (e.g. IRC, listserv, bbs, blog, etc.) used by that community. The degree to which communications produced by a community can be effectively processed by members has consequences for the size, viability and duration of a community’s existence.
2. Topic-dependent: the cognitive process limit of human being affects the behavior of virtual community.
People’s inability to process the vast amount of materials available results in their specializing in areas that they find of particular relevance. As a result, virtual communities are microcultures where like meet like.
Therefore, virtual settlement will be constrained by the willingness and ability of a virtual community’s members to process its virtual settlement’s message.
Some ideas from this paper:
Notion of community in the context: The term community refers to different things, depending on who is using it and on the context in which it is used. We needn’t try to give a comprehensive notion of community. Instead, we give the notion of blog community for our own sake. Based on the scenarios we created, our objective of extracting blog communities is to find a group of people in which there is an integration of content and communication with an emphasis on member-generated content.
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