Online Communities

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Throughout history a debate has raged on whether sense of community, and more broadly community itself, is crumbling. [INSERT two quotes from early and late doomists] What I see in arguments both for and against the ability for sense of community to persevere is a tangled mess of media. Media play varying roles in arguments both for and against the survival of sense of community, but their presence should not be ignored. In some cases media are blamed for declines in sense of community. In others new media technologies are seen as saviors that can bring about a sense of community rebirth. More broadly, media are central to communities—their formation, purposes, and means of connecting. Newspapers inform small and large communities of what is going on—and simultaneously create an imagined community of news-readers who are spread out but engaged and linked through the stories they read. Towns send text messages notifying residents of weather or emergency situations. Online gamers meet up in cafes with their guild members, or teammates, to socialize. Yet these criss-crossing community interactions are often overlooked in discussions of community. Of all the research I have read, it is funny that the work that resonates with me the most is something I mostly disagree with. Turkle’s (1995) exploration of MUD (Multi-User Dungeons)—online social or gaming spaces connecting multiple users—communities for the most part concentrates on the ability of individuals to experiment with new identities, an assumption that is increasingly argued to be a false starting point (Leander, 2008). However, her concept of “synthetic” reality struck me as the perfect explanation for all of the discord in comparing online and offline communities. If all o... ... middle of paper ... ...e of community has most popularly been brought to the public’s attention through Robert Putnam’s (Putnam, 2000; Putnam & Feldstein, 2003) research on social capital. The best-selling book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community not only attracted the attention of the general population but also led to governmental involvement in the re-engagement of community based on Putnam’s finding that civic engagement was declining (Putnam, 2000). Although Putnam’s analysis showed that participation in civic life was declining, it also revealed a desire for greater emphasis on community (Putnam, 2000). Links between community and mental health, physical health, and economic prosperity point to some of the reasons why there is so much interest in understanding the bonds of community and concern about reviving community (Putnam, 2000; Shinn & Toohey, 2002)

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