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last.updated 2.23.09

Digital Communities

Purpose

One of the commonplace arguments about the Internet is that it promotes communities. While there are examples of people using the Internet to communicate with peers across the globe, there are many examples of individuals–sometimes those who are spatially close–struggling to use the technology to benefit those around them and, sometimes, even being socially dysfunctional. We will use this class to explore what a virtual/digital community is, what it can be, and whether we are placing too much stock in the capabilities of the technology.

Informal Presentations

Each student will have approximately five minutes to talk about the work they did for the Metaphor Analysis assignment. For this presentation you should briefly describe the text and explain what you learned through your analysis. This is an informal presentation that is meant to provide concrete examples that we can bring into subsequent discussions.

Discussion: Are these really communities?

As a class we will discuss the following questions:

• What questions did you have about the readings?
• How would you define community?
• Are communities metaphors as Brown argues? And if so, what does she argue that instructors can learn from them?
• Rheingold provides a fairly extensive and relatively optimistic view of virtual communities. What potential does he see? what are the pitfalls? The Virtual Community was published in 1993, how has the notion of virtual communities evolved since his early observations?
• Harry, from Silver's research, proves that trolls or "gadflies" make the community about them. Yet the participants in Silver's study saw this as both a blessing and a curse. Harry gave the online community a purpose some days, but he was annoying. What might this say about the BEV community or digital communities in general?
• How might you try to resolve some of the problems that BEV was having?
• After looking at these examples, how would you define a virtual community? would you define digital community the same way? While this may seem like word play, what do the different connotations add to the conversation? or leave out of the conversation?