C OMMUNITY SUPPORTED BY COMPUTERS

The latest ‘shift’ in the concept of community happened with a military event that changed the course of human history - the World War 2 (WW2). The technology then was primitive if compared to today, but the basis for computing existed. Post

22 war, a significant development was the establishment of a military intelligence agency called Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the U.S.A. determined to find a way to connect multiple computers to make it easier for academics and scholars to share digital works across geographically distributed computers - the Internet in its infancy.

The idea and initiative of building ARPAnet was spearheaded by Licklider, an engineer and a physiological psychologist and the head of Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). His multi-disciplinary background provided a

“perspective uncommon among engineers” (M. Hauben & Hauben, 1998). His vision to create a network of computers was heavily influenced by his view of ‘community’ and the creation of sense of community among computer users. He believed that:

… now the move is on to interconnect the separate communities and thereby transform them into, let us call it, a supercommunity. The hope is that interconnection will make available to all the members of all the communities the programs and data resources of the entire supercommunity. (Licklider & Taylor, 1990, p. 32)

The Internet was built with ‘community’ at its heart. Licklider’s idea of creating a ‘supercommunity’ resonates until the present day. This is the latest ‘reincarnation’ of the concept ‘community’, moving from a concept that was associated with locality, to now being a commonplace concept in conversations, about both offline and online worlds. However, for some, the term became fragmented (Cohen, 1989). Despite this, Yar (2004) believes that the word and its concept continue to capture interest among academics and scholars, particularly because 1) the concept is closely linked to social sciences, and 2) while the death of older forms of community is eminent, technology changes will give birth to a new form of community.

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We are often presented with a dichotomy of community, i.e. the offline and the online community. We use the latter for all sorts of reasons: a person may become a member of a virtual community to learn new knowledge related to his own practice in the real world; another person may join a virtual community of photographers to share his knowledge on the topic of interest. Howard Rheingold – a critic, a teacher and a writer of the book, The Virtual Community, to whom the term ‘virtual community’ is credited - defined virtual communities as “social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace” (Rheingold, 1995). In his book, he narrated his experience of being a member of a virtual community, The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), believed to be among the earliest virtual communities, set up in 1985.

The emergence of online community has grabbed the attention of social science researchers and scholars from many fields, opening the door to multidisciplinary inquiry, making community a focal point for debate among scholars. These debates have led researchers to report on the inner workings of virtual communities, e.g. what drives participation and what impedes it, how does online identity form, what creates satisfaction in the process of knowledge construction and so on. As with the case of ‘community’, online community is open in its interpretation, thus leaving us with a broad range of definitions and typologies.

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Although there have been many instances across the literature outlining types of online communities, for the reason of space, I will examine three recent papers that

24 have proposed a version of online/virtual community typologies: Stanoevska-

Slabeva and Schmid (2001), Henri and Pudelko (2003), and Porter (2004) (see Table 1). As introduced earlier, the GameSalad community can be seen as an example of a hybrid of Organisation-Sponsored, Discussion-focussed Community, and a

Community of Interest.

Table 1: Comparison between three online community typologies.

Author (Year) Online (Virtual) Community Typology

Stanoevska-Slabeva and Schmid (2001)

Discussion Communities: Direct discussion communities, Topic-oriented communities, Communities of practice, Indirect discussion communities.

Task- and Goal-oriented Communities: Transaction communities, Design communities, Online learning communities.

Virtual Worlds. Hybrid Communities.

Henri and Pudelko (2003)

Community of Interest.

Goal-oriented Community of Interest. Learners’ Community.

Community of Practice.

Porter (2004)

Member-Initiated:, Social, Professional.

Organisation-Sponsored: Commercial, Non- profit, Government

Some scholars took on a more romantic view of the term community, to represent a group of users, regardless of their communality. This over-attachment of the word is understandable - we often link ourselves to being part of a community in real life, be it in our neighbourhood, schools or hobbies, and that carries forward in our view of the virtual world as well. Scholars tended to present the idea of a workable communal life in studies of online communities. In a way, this over-romanticised view of community often resulted on the overly positive tone in the literature. In an attempt to address this predicament, Gee suggested a new term with a different perspective. Gee outlined eleven features that defined what he termed ‘affinity

space’: 1) shared common interest, 2) a shared common space, 3) a generative space, 4) progression of space depending on users’ contribution, 5) sharing of intensive and extensive knowledge, 6) encouragement of individual and distributed

knowledge, 7) encouragement of the use of dispersed knowledge, 8) encouragement of tacit knowledge, 9) multiple paths of participation, 10) multiple paths of status attainment, and 11) porous leadership (paraphrased and generalised from Gee, 2012). The term ‘affinity space’ came out from his study of online game worlds and of how learning was connected and embedded in these worlds. This new distinction of online space, rather than online community, opens up the discussions that were previously held back by the notion of ‘community’, particularly on the issue of participation. Although useful, Gee’s affinity space was not found to be a good fit as a lens to understand the activities in the GameSalad community. This is because affinity space appeared from Gee’s disquiet with the idea of membership and sense of belongingness in fluid networks (Gee, 2012). However, in the GameSalad community, membership and sense of belongingness were evidenced throughout and to an extent, defined the community and its members.