Community … Real vs. Online Community: How do we interpret?

Community … Real vs. Online Community: How do we interpret?

In my naivety, I had viewed an online community as being chat room or instant messaging style formats, where participants were communicating in real time, creating and responding, as each participant posted messages to one another. As in the real person format, participants listen and respond, communicating their points of view, gaining instant clarification from how the other(s) responded.

The aspect of delayed communication formats did not occur to me as constituting a community. Letter writing and memos create a community among its members within a work setting and among families, without the use of electronic technology. Long before computers individuals communicated through hand written processes, phone calls, and even the telegraph.

So what constitutes a community? The Miriam-Webster online Dictionary defines community as “ a unified body of individuals”, “ …people with common interests”, “ interacting population of various kinds of individuals”, “a group linked by a common policy … “, “ joint ownership or participation” , and “ a group of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a larger society”. The words used most often are “people”, “common, and “group”. Therefore, we can presume that a community is a group of people with something in common.

Let’s expand this to the electronic communications field, and surmise that a group of people using similar electronic communications who respond to one another would constitute a community. Therefore, any group of people who communicate through phone systems, in pairs or conference calls, would be a community of people discussing a common interest. It would make sense to consider any aspect of communications where the individuals communicate about common interests and topics would represent a community. This sounds so simple when put into this framework or thought process.

Defining online communities would involve all forms of computer-focused communications. Kimball and Rheingold (2000) describes “online social networks [as] webs of relationships that grow from computer mediated discussion … distributed across time and space …” resulting in the need for conversations “to take place online, over an intranet or private internet forum”.

Chat rooms and Instant messaging communications would be a very limited perspective or examples of online communities, when one considers all of the possible ways individuals communicate through network processes. Yet, people use these avenues to have instant communications with one another. Some of the online communities that I have had experience with include email, listserves, and web based messaging, etc.

Many people use email to communicate with others, with recipients of our emails receiving what we communicate to them. This does not necessarily mean that they all know each other, but have the option of responding to all attached to the original email. However, they can react or respond the others easily.

Many computer users tend to have more than one email address for personal email, university email, club/organizations, and a work email. It can become a busy and time-consuming process to check each one daily and attempt to keep up with each. Personal emails are more private, in that they are not part of an address system that is readily accessible to others.

Emails that are part of an organizations email system generally are listed for other system members to access in an address book. Email addresses are configured to be identical with the addition of individual names, whole or abbreviated in a similar fashion, and added to the system address book listing individual names and contact information. This provides the members ease in contacting one another to collaborate on topics of interest or work tasks.

As part of the Virtual Communities class, we have explored other aspects of online communities. It has been surprising to come to the realization that I have belonged to multiple online communities, some for a very long time, and not have realized the extent of my reliance on these communities. Listservs seem to include the bulk of my interactions for work topics. Involvement in numerous programs within the school environment has encouraged me to look outside of the school walls to others involved in similar activities. Enrolling into several Listservs has offered a vast amount of information of shared ideas, new research, training conferences, and so on that I would not have had readily available.

Members of one in particular tend to be from all parts of the United States, and internationally, addressing issues related to my job. It includes other teachers, teachers in training, professors, researchers, and other professionals dealing with the Blind and Visually Impaired. It offers such a wealth of information and suggestions that comes to me easily through a work email system. An important feature is the controls established by a listserve administrator, who manages the members, limiting it to those associated to organizations dealing with the Blind and Visually Impaired, and denying open access by anyone, including spammers.

As a member of a training and task force member for the NYS Education Department, I travel to Albany five to six times per year for larger group meetings. Yet, continual discussions and clarifications of information need to go on regularly. Frequent travel to meet in one location is costly and takes a great deal of time away from family and work responsibilities. Therefore, we use an email listserve that allows the members to post questions, ideas, or help one another on specific aspects of the project. Yet, all members have access to the conversations and are free to respond as they wish. It has proved to be extremely helpful during the past five years that I have belonged to this training group. This type of communication tool has also allowed sharing of documents, PowerPoint training tools, travel forms, etc. quickly and easily.

Weblogs are not new to the internet, yet are only recently growing in popularity with individuals and groups. Weblogs or “blogs” are pages with information entered by the owner(s) and listed in dated sequence. They can be accessed and altered by its owner(s) to post their personal communications, with the ability to comment on previous entries. It has become increasingly popular with individuals who travel or live away from their homes for any length of time, as a means of sharing their experiences with friends and family.

I have “played” with several blogs over the years as part of a personal journal, another for a class project, and a third one with another friend who lives afar. Each blog is limited in what the focus was to be. Yet, it could have been expansive to include multiple avenues of interest.

Take a journey through a blog world as I did recently. I spent an hour exploring others blogs. The journey took me to a woman’s journal of her pregnancy, including pictures of the nursery and the sonogram. In others, I experienced poetry, photographs of someone’s travels, another’s art, political and religious views, a history teacher’s interactive blog with her class, pics of newborn puppies, entries in other languages, journal entries discussing life, the struggle to quit smoking, and so on. To say the least, it was enlightening and entertaining.

Most web pages are designed with a contact option, as with most product-based or organizational web sites. They offer the possibility to contact the administrator or support group to pose questions or comments. Even our blogs offer the option to allow other to contact us through email.

Information expands our ability to look at a topic and see it in a new light, in various views. Network communications offer a more viable means for larger groups of people to converse with one another about any given topic, particularly if the location of the group members creates difficulty with meeting regularly to work out details. Online communities can be personal in nature, focused on interests, hobbies, views, and as a way to communicate with others long distance. Accessibility to an online computer opens up the network to a vast expanse of opportunities to talk to anyone around the world in a variety of internet web pages, email systems, and so on. It is amazing to comprehend that the internet is still young and growing and yet, so vast and full of possibilities.

Kimball, Lisa, and Rheingold, Howard (2000). How Online Social Networks Benefit Organizations. Retrieved on February 6, 2005 from http://www.rheingold.com/Associates/onlinenetworks.html.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary (2005). Located at http://www.merriam-webster.com/.