How "Authentic" Are Virtual Communities?
A lively debate has been going on for some time over how authentic virtual communities are. In describing what goes on in virtual communities, Howard Rheingold has written that:
People in virtual communities use words on screens to exchange pleasantries and argue, engage in intellectual discourse, conduct commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose them, play games, flirt, create a little high art and a lot of idle talk. People in virtual communities do just about everything people do in real life, but we leave our bodies behind.
Not everyone agrees with this perspective. Skeptics argue that virtual communities lack some of the critical elements that define authentic communities, especially communities that are geographically based. For example, after visiting an online community, Clifford Stoll in his book Silicon Snake Oil, asked:
Whats missing from this ersatz neighborhood? A feeling of permanence and belonging, a sense of location, a warmth from the local history. Gone is the very essence of a neighborhood: friendly relations and a sense of being in it together.
Who is right? One way that virtual communities differ from "real communities" is, precisely, that they are "virtual." They exist only in cyberspace. While it takes effort to move away from a physical place, it takes virtually no effort for an individual to leave a virtual community and move on to another. But that does not mean that participants dont really care about their communities. In fact, many participants care passionately and remain actively involved in virtual communities for years. And many virtual communities have discovered that participants develop friendships so strong that they will go to the trouble of meeting other participants in person. In the case of both SeniorNet and Fujitsus WorldsAway (and in many other virtual communities as well), individuals who originally met online have arranged to meet in the "real world." In some cases, these get-togethers have become regular events.
A number of social scientists have begun to investigate the extent to which virtual communities resemble or differ from "real" communities (see Sidebar 1, "elements of a community," next page). For example, a recent study by Teresa L. Roberts of Sun Microsystems looked at whether participants in Internet newsgroups do, in fact, feel that they "belong" to a community. She interviewed participants in 30 Internet-based newsgroups and found that 61 percent of the respondents reported that they had formed friendships online and that two-thirds of them felt a sense of "belonging to their group." The study also found that the most important determinant of a feeling of belonging was the extent to which individuals participated in and contributed to the group.