Virtually Finding Community in the Third Space

The Internet has enabled individuals to communicate across continents and also through temporal spaces, making both place and time irrelevant to these communications. The specific interaction systems utilized for these purposes are referred to as computer-mediated communication (CMC) technologies and encompass electronic mail (e-mail), bulletin board systems and Internet Relay Chat (IRC), to name the most well-known of these technologies. Each of these technologies allows for the gathering of individuals within cyberspace to converse and to exchange information with each other. It is interesting to note that the terms communication and community stem from a Latin word meaning “common,” and thus it can be inferred that communication is a process through which community can be developed (Fernback & Thompson, 1995). Licklider and Taylor (1968), predicted three decades ago that computer networks would become communities, and “in most fields they will consist of geographically separated members …” (online) gathering within a common communication space. Earlier technologies such as the telephone have inspired scholars to state that we now live in a boundless “global village” (McLuhan, 1964). Current CMC technologies have brought about the possibility of numerous people meeting online and conversing with and between each other, allowing for a meeting “space” that consists of abrogated time and place (Fernback & Thompson, 1995), with no boundaries of race, gender or creed. It is from these utopian ideals that the idea of virtual communities has stemmed. The concept of the “virtual community” refers to groupings of individuals utilizing CMC technologies in such a way that they can be likened to communities in the physical world. Rheingold (1993c) states that “virtual communities might be real communities, they might be pseudocommunities or they might be something entirely new in the realm of social contracts” (p. 62). Thus, the question still remains as to whether “virtual communities” can replicate communities that exist in the physical world.

Virtual Community as New Marketing Channel

Virtual community is a virtual meeting place where individuals with common areas of interests share information, ideas, experiences, and feelings (Rheingold, 1993) by using information and communication technology (ICT), especially the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW). It has been taken for granted that people with shared interests would aggregate together. This assumption is equally applicable to the virtual world. As such, a wide variety of discussion topics bring different Internet users together online across time and space. Virtual community has been a pervasive concept emphasizing social aggregation and social events in the computer-mediated environment. This concept has been extended to the horizon of commerce. Hagel and Armstrong (1997) contend in their book, Net Gain, that virtual community could be an important element of a successful Web-based business structure and that community-based business structure helps expand markets for businesses. Businesses have increasingly begun to recognize that they can build their brand images, deliver promotional messages, and retain consumers’ loyalty through online communities. As such, more and more businesses include bulletin boards, discussion groups, and e-mail functions in their business Web sites with the aim to creating a community atmosphere among their customers (Maclaran & Catterall, 2002). This strategy not only helps attract consumers but also helps increase return rate (Hagel, 1999). In the long run, it could promote favorable attitude toward the brand and increase purchasing behavior (Subramaniam, Shaw, & Gardner, 2000). Indeed, virtual communities have opened up new opportunities and established new models for business to reach out and communicate with their consumers. Although the market has become more and more fragmented with the globalization of commerce, virtual communities provide businesses with access to targeted consumers in that various aggregations of Internet users are like different segments of markets. Virtual community indeed has become a new marketing channel for business. Many online communities are business oriented in nature with business participating as organizers, sponsors, or advertisers.

Virtual Communities Wish List

Experience with virtual communities such as Yahoo Groups, Community Zero, Blackboard and WebCT and working with ad hoc and formal groups (such as IEEE committees) has provided a basis for a “wish list” of virtual community capabilities. For any given audience, purpose, life-cycle and culture the relevant elements of this list will vary (Kim, 2000). With emerging technology and evolving experience, additional elements should be added. This, then, is a starting point for identifying the specific requirements for a specific virtual community. Here, general functions are described, as well as functions as seen by users or administrators of a virtual community. The format is intentionally terse to facilitate the use of this information as the basis for a checklist in evaluating requirements, alternatives and priorities. The general concepts of “push” (data is delivered to users, e-mail being an example) and “pull” (where data is only available when the user chooses to seek it out) are highly relevant. Maintaining community “interaction” is dependent on having a core of participants who are regularly interacting, and the “push” model can facilitate this among less experienced users.

Virtual Communities for Development

Americans, and to some extension, the greater world, appear to have an obsession with celebrity. We often find ourselves defined not by our deeds but by our relationship, either real or imagined, with famous people. Celebrity lives appear more appealing or real to us because we can see their lives up close and in ways we cannot see our own. Peter Howe (2005), in his book Paparazzi: And Our Obsession With Celebrity, examines the origins, ethics and our insatiable appetite for celebrity that keeps the paparazzi in such demand. With so many things competing for our attention, we often pursue the path of least resistance. We go to bed and wake up to the celebration of celebrity through mass communications media. The major network television morning news and late-night shows tend to focus only the first 10 minutes of broadcast, if any, on national and local affairs of society, and then quickly retreat to celebrity promotions or gossip. For dinnertime or early evening entertainment, the major networks are filled with such shows as Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood and Celebrity Justice. Cable networks and radio also serve as additional mass-media vehicles to further celebrate and promote celebrity. The Internet has become the newest vehicle to help feed this frenzy of celebrity pursuit. Thousands of virtual communities of interests have developed to help foster a sense of relationships to celebrities, feed these obsessions and escape from reality. Does Internet usage favor the development of new communities, virtual communities; or instead, is it inducing personal isolation, severing people’s ties with society and ultimately the real world? This article examines virtual communities from the perspective of the American obsession with celebrity, using as an example a Yahoo celebrity virtual community that has evolved over a period of four years.

Virtual Communities and Social Capital Theory

Imagine a neighborhood where young children can play freely in the streets and various backyards without direct parental oversight, the implication being that other adults in the vicinity will watch out for the children. If a parent is late getting home before the school bus, the children know which neighbors’ house to go to and will be well cared for until the parent arrives home. The residents are very willing to help each other, perhaps by moving a sofa down to a basement or lending a ladder for a project. In such a neighborhood, the first place one turns to for recommendations for plumbers, dry cleaners, and preschools, or perhaps to borrow a tool, is each other. Perhaps one person has secured a job for a neighbor’s daughter, and another family has “paved the way” for their neighbor’s entry into a country club. If a person has a need for emotional support to deal with a personal crisis, she turns to a neighbor. Such a neighborhood can be said to have social capital—that resource that comes from relations between people that makes lives more productive and easier. Social capital is not only created from groups of people living in very close proximity, such as in a neighborhood. It might be created between people belonging to the same church or civic group, or perhaps between people who met at a hospital support group for a particular affliction, or people who are alumni of a particular university. These groups of people can be said to constitute communities, or gatherings of people who have common interests or ties. In the past, these communities tended also to be focused in a local geographic area. This article will examine social capital in the context on online communities. Online communities, like physically based communities such as church groups or neighborhoods, can also be said to produce social capital for their members. These virtual communities can create and foster social capital—and indeed, it may be social capital that draws and retains their members. The background of social capital theory will be examined and then applied in the virtual community context.

Virtual Communities and Local Youth E-Democracy

E-democracy, digital democracy, and e-government are all phenomena that are developing together with ICT sector growth and rapid public-service development processes. Governments, at least in the Nordic countries, have strongly supported change in the Information Society and in electronic services. From a broad perspective the change is not only about transferring the services onto the Internet and making them reachable via different network infrastructures: it is more a question of profound strategic change in public-sector services overall, and a new kind of “virtual” citizenship. Support for traditional political participation will come from technology, online information, 24 hour discussion groups, and local virtual arenas such as municipality web sites. (Grönlund, 2003; Hacker & van Dijk, 2000). Participation, voting, and especially, youth empowerment are important activities for building up the Information Society. Voting rates have declined during the last few years in both local and government elections in Finland. Similar results have also been reported from other European countries (Macintosh et al., 2003). Surprisingly, large groups of young people have totally rejected participation in political elections. This has been seen as a strong sign of the possible destruction of the welfare state, and also a major threat to Western democracy. Participation in elections of people from all social groups, from different geographical areas, and from all age groups has been seen as the most powerful way of committing citizens to the costs and delivery ideology of Nordic welfare-state services. The traditional decision making in the public sector has been strongly in the domain of the professionals, and it has been implemented in top-down official hierarchies. Elements such as formal politics, administration, and civil society are all in the process of transformation. At the same time, emerging technology enables citizens to obtain and actively use all kinds of public information. Information Society rules and regulations have to be rewritten quickly, especially as young people start using the participation channels actively. Today’s youth is familiar with virtual realities in the form of avatars or different kinds of virtual features, and knows how to remain unidentified if necessary.

Virtual Collaborative Design

As we enter the third millennium, many organizations are forced to constantly pursue new strategies to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Examples include offering customers streams of new products and services, as well as continuously seeking to improve productivity, services and the effectiveness of product design, development and manufacturing processes. Consequently, new concepts, approaches and tools are emerging quickly as the globalization trend expands across the world. Product complexity, pressures to reduce production cycle time, the need for stakeholders’ contributions and multinational company as well as consumer requirements create the demand for sophisticated multi-designer collaborative virtual environments where product design can be shared and acted upon (Kunz, Christiansen, Cohen, Jin, & Levitt, 1998; Ragusa & Bochanek, 2001; Anderson, Esser & Interrante, 2003). Thus, researchers and practitioners recognize that collaboration is an essential aspect of contemporary, professional product design and development activities. The design process is collaborative by nature. Collaborative design fosters participation of stakeholders in any form during the design process. The design of a successful product is dependent on integrating information and experiences from a number of different knowledge domains. These domains include consumer (end-user) requirements, industrial designers’ professional design skills as well as manufacturers’ needs. This results in a product that performs at a functional as well as aesthetic level and that can be manufactured by the right process at the right price. End-user involvement is essential to product design, since products that do not achieve consumer satisfaction or meet consumer needs are doomed to fail (Schultz, 2001). Accurate understanding of user needs is an essential aspect in developing commercially successful products (Achilladelis, 1971). Hence, it is very important for industrial designers to gather the end-users’ needs and incorporate them into their designs. The involvement of manufacturers in the initial stages of the domestic product design process can lead to a dramatic reduction in a product’s development lifecycle time, also facilitating the coordination of the purchasing and engineering functions (Bochanek & Ragusa, 2001; Demirbilek, 2001). The increasing complexity of artifacts and the globalization of product development are changing research methodologies and techniques. A prime example of this includes the application of a virtual collaborative design environment (VCDE) for product design and manufacturing. This article focuses on the concept of virtual collaborative design. It describes a research effort to investigate cross-cultural collaboration in product development using online applications for domestic product design. The aim of this research is to investigate issues related to the virtual collaborative design (VCD) process, and to bring an understanding of stakeholder needs during the collaborative design process as well as to improve the relationships between end-users, designers and manufacturers. The article presents findings based on a survey study conducted with four different potential stakeholders: representatives of consumers, software designers, industrial designers and manufacturers.

User Trust in BBS Comunities

The Bulletin Board System (BBS), when it first appeared in the middle 1970s, was essentially “a personal computer, not necessarily an expensive one, running inexpensive BBS software, plugged into an ordinary telephone line via a small electronic device called modem” (Rheingold, 1993). The networked computers used to create these parallel worlds and facilitate communication between human beings constitute the technical foundations of computer-mediated communication (CMC) (Nancy, 1998). CMC systems link people around the world into public discussions. While CMC can exist solely between two people or between one person and an anonymous group, increasingly, virtual communities of many people are being formed. With advent of the Internet, the World Wide Web (WWW) brought more new technologies to the BBS. Thousands of BBSs sprang up across the world. Many turned out tremendously successful and evolved into lively virtual communities. These communities provided forums with increasing importance for individuals and groups that share a professional interest or share common activities. Online BBS communities now play an important role in information dissemination and knowledge collaboration on the Internet. On one hand, online forums enable people to disseminate information in an extremely efficient way without geographical restriction. On the other hand, the freedom also comes with uncertainty. Any information can be released and the content is almost beyond control, or even unreliable. To understand the content and quality of the information in BBSs, we would split the task into two subjects: one is to assess the information sources; another is to assess the information providers, people themselves in the virtual communities. Most BBSs are anonymous, because people usually use a pseudonym rather than their real name when registering. A user does not need to provide real personal information to the system, either. Thus, how to assess the trust of the users in a BBS community and attract more trustful and worthy users to participate in the activities of the community have become crucial topics to establish a successful community. Two subjects are important for establishing user trust in a BBS community: First, a BBS system must be able to identify a user and provide efficient security protection for each user and his/her privacy. Second, the value and the trustworthiness of a user should be assessed according to that user’s behavior and contribution to the community in comparison to peers.

Trust in Virtual Communities

Trust is one of the key factors that emerged as a significant concept in virtual communities. Trust is so complicated that it is hard to define in one standardized way. Trust issues have evolved into two major ways in the fields of virtual community and security. Among a huge literature concerning trust in virtual communities, a majority of literature addresses technical solutions on trust-building by providing new Web-based applications. They range from human users authorization, semantic Web, agent technologies and access control of network to W3C standardization for content trust and security. Some examples include AT&T’s Policymaker or IBM’s Trust Establishment Module (Blaze, Feigenbaum, & Lacy, 1996; Herzberg, 2000). Only a minority deals with understanding the concept of trust and sources of trust-building from social and cultural aspects. It appears to miss the essence of trust in virtual communities, although an integrated approach is needed for building trust in communication and the use of virtual communities. This article aims to present the definition of trust and relevant concepts for recognizing sources of trust-building in virtual communities. This article also presents future research implications for further development on trust and trust-building in virtual communities.

Predicting Activity Levels in Virtual Communities

Data was collected from two communities: a smaller community with approximately 200 participants, but where the number of participants is precisely known; and a very large community, with thousands of participants, where the number of participants can only be estimated from the number of different nicknames used within a given time interval. Data from certain days when there were documented technical issues that may have affected activity has been removed from the sample. In both cases, we have taken one geographically centric data series and one global series, covering users in multiple areas and time zones. We use the number of messages sent in three-hour intervals as a proxy for the activity level in a community, as accurate figures regarding the number of messages viewed by unique persons are difficult to establish. This results in a data set of approximately 9,500 samples from each community, collected over a period of just less than four years. When fitting the models, we used accepted back-testing standards, relying on a fixed interval (one year) when fitting parameters and forecasting activity for any given point in time. One exception to this is seasonality adjustment, where we used the entire data set—this should not have a significant effect, as we made the same seasonal adjustment to the input for all models. Empirical results provided throughout the article are based on data from the larger community.