Module 2: Topic 2.2

Topic 2.2 - Community and Identity

Said - Can a Virtual Community be any different from the experience of a Real Community?

What is a community?

• "...a group of people having common interests"
• "...a group viewed as forming a distinct segment of the society"

What is a real community?

• Real/Offline community - "...one which shares a common cultural or social heritage and can easily establish a social interaction and regular contact...shared the same values, they can be parts of many different communities simultaneously. There is also a strong sense of unity and fellowship in a community"

What is a virtual community?

• "Different people from different parts of the world establish a virtual community in cyber space. Here they share their ideas, opinions, beliefs, political perspectives, interests etc."
• "Virtual communities are ... formed through computer-mediated communities (CMC)"
• "...different groups of people can subscribe to virtual communities that tend to their needs and search for those particular people who espouse the same beliefs as theirs"

Utopian vision:

• "...emphasises the exciting possibilities of a computing technology such as global connectivity, democratisation, and the opening of the frontier of human experience and relationship which were impossible before"

Dystopian vision:

• "...deals with people's enslavement to the digital technology and their growing dependency on it"
• "...also concerns itself with the unstoppable growth of technology which may bring with it information overload and a breakdown of social structures and values"

Identity in a Virtual Community:

• "...most appealing thing about the Internet is the anonymity it provides - it makes it easy to present oneself as another person"

Slater - Social Relationships and Identity Online and Offline

p. 533

• "On the other hand, to study the Internet as culture means regarding it as a social space in its own right, rather than as a complex object used within other, contextualising spaces. It means looking at the forms of communication, sociality and identity that are produced within this social space, and how they are sustained using the resources available within the online setting."

p. 535

• "...feature of computer-mediated communications is that it allows communications between people who are spatially dispersed ... important factor ... is not where in the world you are, but how you are using the communicative facilities at your disposal. The irrelevance of geographical position to Internet communication is often referred to as 'disembedding'."

p. 536

• "'Disembodiment' signifies that a person's online identity is apparently separate from their physical presence, a condition associated with two features: textuality and anonymity"
• "...the phrase 'you are what you type' summed up the sense that a person's online performance of identity had to be taken at face value, if only because there is no other information to go on. This conspicuously includes such visible markers of sex, race and age which, in offline interactions, fix identities in bodies"
• "...online presence is apparently disembodied in the broader sense that it can be detached from other ways in which offline presences are held stable and accountable: names, addresses, one's past relationships and biography as they are fixed"