An academic introduction to the model of computer-mediated community

Framework: Social Organisation in computer-mediated communities

The concept community has been one of the most essential issues for sociologists. The main concern has been that the rapid modernisation, i.e. bureaucratisation, industrialisation, urbanisation and capitalism have affected, perhaps even ruined community (Wellman & Gulia 1999, 169). However, as a strict theoretical concept, community has been a tough challenge even for sociologists. It has been the water in which the sociologist-fish swims. It is used but not analysed much as such. Furthermore, computer-mediated communities is such a new phenomenon for the time span of sociology (premodern-modern-postmodern) that serious academic sociology has said very little about them – if, then mostly from a popular zeitgeist perspective like Maffesoli etc., or from a social network perspective (Wellman 1988, Wellman & Gulia 1999). The former does not serve much practical research and the latter would have needed totally different data and methods that were meaningful and available in this modelling work.

If we define or, better, describe community (combining definitional elements of (online or not) community literature by Preece 2000, Lehtonen 1990, Unruh 1983 and Brint 2001) by three groups of requirements, we can say that a Computer-mediated community is something that

1. Uses computer-mediated communication and common languages to maintain principally reciprocal relations,
2. Has shared activities, resources, beliefs, relatively easy access and weak structure of power, and no strict geographical borders,
3. Whose members are bound together PRINCIPALLY (i.e., not always in practice) by relations of affect, loyalty, common values and goals and/or personal concern.

In short, if we take computer-mediated community as such that has meaningful social interaction between participants and they themselves have a feeling of togetherness, belonging to some joint notion of ‘we’, we need, however, to lean on methodologically holistic (community is more than the sum of its parts or members together) lines of thought, to be able to discuss sociological terms in this CMC field. The notion is worth stressing, since the cognitive psychology seems to be the mainstream epistemology among HCI and even among some CSCW researchers.

Stemming from Steven G. Jones (1998), computer-mediated communication (CMC) and the idea of community can be viewed in a centuries old trend from pre-modern to modern and then post-modern times. The traditional small-scale face-to-face communication has changed first to modern, mass-mediated and broadcasted information, and then, with the help of CMC, to a hybrid of mass-produced, mass-used, and yet experientially more private and individualised products and experiences. (See also Mynatt et al. 1998, 127-128.) New communication means and patterns make people "believe we are supposed to reorganise social relations around a new technology" (p. 24). The leading idea of community has changed following the same line as the communication pattern – from (village-like) personal to (urban-like) impersonal human relations. Currently, in the case of online communities, communication can be understood as a mixture of impersonal, ephemeral and simultaneously emotionally touching relations with ‘unknown’ people whose particular aspects one may still know deeply.

According to Nancy K. Baym (1998, 62)

"CMC develop forms of expression that enable them to communicate social information and to create and codify group-specific meanings, socially negotiate group-specific identities, form relationships that span from the playfully antagonistic to the deeply romantic and that move between the network and face-to-face interaction, and create norms that serve to organize interaction and to maintain desirable social climates."

This is shaped by the variety of outside resources: "the factors of temporal structure, external contexts, system infrastructure, group purposes, and participant and group characteristics(.)" "...these stable patterns of social meanings, manifested through a group’s ongoing discourse, that enable participants to imagine themselves part of a community." Generally, it is precisely these mentioned functions of CMC that the fansites of Habbo Hotel, our largest case within the model construction work, are keeping alive. That is why the fansites of Habbo Hotel can be seen as creating and maintaining the community in its most demanding meaning: existing for its members as an end in itself.

Furthermore, there are theoretically informed writings of dealing with effective elements such as social control in terms of presence, (commitment in frequency of interaction), and acceptance of difference that is different in activity- vs. belief-based communities (Brint 2001). There are design-oriented community characteristics such as of people, the range of their purposes, and type of governance policies they have (Preece 2000 and de Souza & Preece 2004).

If the computer-mediated communication is a field nearest to our views, the second is surely field of information systems. According to Holmström (2004, 41), "the term "community" is transferred to describe the nature of computer-mediated interaction that goes beyond the mere function of communication — for mediating the negotiation (Wenger 1998) and transformation of relationships (Boland and Tenkasi 1995) that takes place among community members. Here, the medium itself becomes important in bringing geographically distributed people together, and in addition to the social aspects of community, the definitions include also technical aspects."

However, perhaps the most relevant perspective for this article can be found in the article of Elizabeth D. Mynatt, Vicki L. O'Day, Annette Adler and Mizuko Ito (1998). They "introduce the concept of 'network communities' and argue that these embody a unique constellation of characteristics that distinguish them from other forms of media and from other types of computational systems." (Holmström 2004, 42) In their sophisticated article they intertwine in a multidisciplinary way the technology – community relation.

As the main result, Mynatt et al. formulates the governing features and structures of the network community and refers in the end shortly to the importance of community participants social practices such as initiation, learning and governance.

In constructing our model, we continued from that point. Those social practices belong to the comprehensive social and discursive practices we are describing in this article. However, the emphasis of these mentioned studies is after all on the structure of community. We need, instead, a framework that stress the social meanings, i.e. lived social experiences connected to computational environment. Furthermore, we are dealing with a larger scale community that may include, for example, an almost countless amount of fansites mostly loosely knit together but eagerly referring to one particular main site. For this reason we apply Anselm Strauss’ (1978, 1993) perspective of social worlds.

There are also other reason to use Strauss, but about them you can read on the webpage presenting our interpretation of Social Worlds' sub-processes and Social Design Strategies. Strauss suggests that his concept of social world can be used to analyse phenomena as varied as the following, for example: opera, baseball, surfing, collecting stamps, country music, gay, politics, medicine, law, mathematics, science, Catholicism.

In every social world - be it visible or hidden, public or private, new or established, open or closed, hierarchic or free - one can identify at least one primary activity. It can be mountain climbing, research, collecting, etc. and it happens in a certain site. Technologies are related to the activity and it is organised in a certain way. These characteristics can be delineated to subprocesses: finding a site, financing it, protecting; technology innovation, production, marketing, teaching; building, expanding, defending, taking over, and changing organisations. In social worlds learning takes place in meetings, technologies are borrowed, and skills are learned and taught.

A social world is divided into subworlds. Discussions emerge about authenticity, who was the first, what’s most important, and who’s got the power to define these issues? One can analyse socialisation, how individuals come into contact with a social world, how the introduction is carried out, different career paths, marginalisation, and parallel memberships. In every social world, the discussions and negotiations take place at different varenas for communication. In social worlds, for instance in architecture, art, and literature there are different social movements and fashions that evokes emotions. The mass-circulated magazines of a social world helps members with hints and advice, it markets various places and future events, reports on past events, and mediate information and opinions about important matters.

Strauss is a widely cited writer, and so is the theory of social worlds. A search on http://scholar.google.com gives more than 200 hits to his journal article "Social world perspective" (1978) and his more recent book (1993) dealing partly with the social world. To mention but a few, there is Garrety - Badham (1999) handling trajectories, social worlds and boundary objects in which the idea of social world is recognized but not analysed as such. Hermaniowicz (2005) deals with social worlds and U.S. universities, and gives a good general description of the term. Kazmer writes about the leaving online community, and gives great descriptions of functions and needs of social worlds. With the help of also Clarke (1991) she describes how social world means about the same as community, and how community differs from group.

However, the concept (Strauss's) social world as such has not been analysed and thus conversed into practical guidelines in the sense we do in this model. In that sense, this way of using (yes, rather shamelessly) the concept social world is rather unique. As a good Chicago School’s social constructionist Strauss gives these notions merely as an outline, not as a readymade list of the only relevant elements. Although Strauss didn’t consider online communities in particular, most of his thematics are amazingly relevant for our study on social world around the Habbo Hotel and other computer-mediated communities.

References

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Boland, J.R and Tenkasi, R.V. (1995): Perspective making and perspective taking in communities of knowing. Organization Science, 6(4):350--372.

Brint, S. (2001). Gemeinschaft Revisited. A Critique and Reconstruction of the Community Concept. Sociological Theory 19:1 March.

Clarke, A. (1991). Social worlds/arenas theory as organizational theory. In D. Maines (Ed.), Social organization and social process: Essays in honor of Anselm Strauss (pp. 119-158). New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

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