E-sociability metaphors: From virtual community to social network and beyond AoIR Rethinking Community, Rethinking Place Copenhagen, 16 October 2008 Marianne van den Boomen Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, NL

Virtual communities "Virtual communities are 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" (Howard Rheingold, The virtual community, 1993) localized social aggregation on the Internet based on shared practice, interest, or value gathering at a collective place having a core of recurrent active users engaged in on ongoing group communication and so developing a common frame of reference

The community metaphor Imagined community at a virtual space evoked by: 1) communication software (Usenet, IRC, web forums etc)‏ 2) a strong metaphor: community (borrowed from a pre-modern village)

Web 2.0: users, data, scripts participatory culture, user generated content, communities contributing, linking, and sharing of semi-autonomous entities cross-site platform: scripts, databases patterns, clusters, issues, personal networks, groups communities?

Web 2.0 communities? the page is dissolved as unit for collective gathering on the fly aggregation and reassemblage of user enriched data interacting data entities rather than interacting users no common collective place of gathering no ongoing debate between a recurrent group of users

Networks instead of communities? heterogeneous decentralised, distributed deterritorialized no a priori hierarchy no a priori structure no a priori space

Telegraph vs nerve network constructed infrastructure homogeneous hard organic feedback system heterogeneous soft-fluid

Network maps Network: metaphor for any system in which nodes and relations can be distinguished: cell metabolism - movie actors in films - results of search engines - citations in scientific journals - neighbor support - Internet routers - pages & hyperlinks - visitors & traffic – blogs & issues - people & social ties

This is not a network