Blanchard, Anita. “Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project.” Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. Ed. Laura J. Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman. June 2004. 6 Nov. 2005 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogs_as_virtual.html.
term: computer-mediated communication (CMC) groups
are these CMCs virtual communities?
term “community” becomes overused – is it meaningless now?
More locally, researchers have argued that virtual communities can increase involvement within people’s face-to-face communities by increasing democratic participation and other community activism (Bakardjieva & Feenberg, 2002; Blanchard & Horan, 1998; Schuler, 1996). Some researchers have even empirically shown that participation in virtual communities can increase participation in face-to-face communities (Blanchard, in press; Wellman, Haase, Witte, & Hampton, 2001). So there are arguments for and evidence of the positive social effects of virtual community participation.
A second, more practical, reason for the importance of virtual communities relates to the CMC group’s sustainability. The term “community“ implies an emotionally positive effect to which even critics of the use of the term agree (Harris, 1999). Information science professionals and psychologists argue that this positive emotion creates an intrinsically rewarding reason to continue participation in the group (Kuo, 2003; Whitworth & De Moor, 2003). When participants experience feelings of community, they are more likely to increase or maintain their participation in the virtual communities. Additionally, the lack of this feeling among participants may be the key to explaining the frequent demise of many CMC groups. A virtual community, therefore, is more likely to be self-sustaining than a “regular“ virtual group, and sustainability is a goal important to both for the sponsors and the participants of any particular virtual group.
What are virtual communities?
ones (1997) argues that researchers need to differentiate between the technology on which the virtual group exists and the actual virtual community. Jones (1997) proposes, and others concur (Liu, 1999; Nocera, 2002), that we should first consider the virtual settlement within which virtual communities exist. Jones defines virtual settlements as the virtual place in which people interact. He uses the analogy of archaeology to develop his model: archaeologists understand a village by understanding the cultural artifacts (e.g., arrowheads, pots, etc.) that they find. Similarly, Jones argues that we can understand virtual communities by understanding the artifacts of its virtual settlement: its postings, structure and content.
Jones (1997) proposes that a virtual settlement exists when there are a) a minimal number of b) public interactions c) with a variety of communicators in which d) there is a minimal level of sustained membership over a period of time. Additionally, Jones (1997) submits that even though virtual communities and virtual settlements are conceptually separate, if one finds a virtual settlement, then one has found a virtual community. He adds that the feelings and social relationships that develop within the virtual settlement help distinguish a virtual community from a virtual group.
Although Jones (1997) regards these feelings as important, he does not provide much insight into their nature. Blanchard and Markus (2003), however, do focus on these feelings, defining them as a psychological sense of community. They go further than Jones and argue that sense of community is an essential characteristic of virtual communities. Essentially, virtual settlements are necessary, but not sufficient conditions for a virtual community. It is the sense of community that distinguishes virtual communities from mere virtual groups.
There is a sense of community in virtual communties – are blogs virtual communities, she asks.
Blanchard goes on to look at Julie/Julia Project, a blog that lasted a year on Salon.com, and found that those who were highly active on the site (commenters) had a very high sense of community, but those who were just lurkers had a low sense of community.
As I read this, I was skeptical that a single blog was a virtual community and felt that a better view of virtual communities would be to look at communities of weblogs (like a circle of weblogs related to similar research, for example). This would be better because there is not a reliance on a single blogger, who, if he, she, or zie stops blogging, ends the community. Instead, there are multiple bloggers, so the community does not end. Then Blanchard writes:
Interactive blogrolls connecting blogs with highly active comments’ sections may create communities of blogs who share an audience. If this interlinking of blogs develops around particular topics, it is possible that a sense of community may develop and be shared between these interactive blogs. This will decrease the dependence of the virtual community on any one blog author and increase the chances of viability for the virtual blog community as a whole.
And I felt much happier with her analysis.
