Introduction

This page gives a larger background for the list of Social Design Strategies. Actually, the list is a conversed and concise form of the content of this page. This page opens up the social dynamics of vague communities, and the list of social design strategies "translates" the dynamics into strategies of designing computer-mediated communities.

Social aggregations of people using computers and telecommunication technologies, most typically the Internet, are usually called virtual, online, or digital communities. Since offline influences online and vice versa, and virtuality is real enough, we use the term computer-mediated community instead, to refer computer-supported communication among members of those communities.

The term community has been traditionally used in sociology in varied ways. In theoretical community studies the term has been defined so many ways that no leading one can be stated. However, the definitions are all too "demanding" for current digital communities that do not bind people as tightly as traditional communities, such as villages or neighbourhoods did. For this reason, broader definitions for today’s “vague” communites are needed. Anselm Strauss’s theory of social worlds deals with large social gatherings that are mostly connected via mass media. The theory was published in an article in 1978, long before the Internet was become widely used. However, the mass media connection makes the social world theory very applicable in the communal environments we live in at the moment.

First (for hasty readers), Anselm Strauss’s theory of social world processes have been conversed by us into a concise list of eight social design strategies (cf. A.J. Kim 2000). The list is aimed at community managers of rather large communities (and companies) who maintain and develop their current communities, instead of, say, start-up companies building their community from scratch, having not yet real members. Here, those eight (3+5) processes, including most relevant examples of their sub-processes, are presented more widely from the perspective of computer-supported or -mediated communication, especially that of online gameplaying. On the right side of the page there are boxes including examples (mostly dealing with functionalities) of that particular social world process in more or less general computer-mediated community. In many cases the examples are from Habbo Hotel and Geocaching.