Exploring the Common Ground of Virtual Communities: Working towards a 'workable definition (original) (raw)

Towards a Definition of Virtual Community

Signo y pensamento, 2019

Abstract: Online, communities of people aggregate, sharing common interests, ideas, and feelings over the Internet. In this article we focus on the concept of so-called virtual communities (VCs) from a theoretical and empirical perspective. We want to provide a definition from desk research which can be useful on the theoretical and the empirical level. Moreover, we compare it with the definition that emerges from the interviews, which is typical from the qualitative approach perspective. Research questions (RQs) are: (1) How can a VC be defined? and (2) How is a VC defined by its users? We used Porter's typology of VCs to select four case studies and conducted 49 in-depth interviews with their members. Our study points to the applicability and usefulness of Porter's typology of virtual communities and suggests a new approach for defining the concept VC. Resumen: En la Internet, comunidades de personas se juntan, comparten intereses comunes, ideas y sentimientos por toda la red. En este artículo, nos centramos en el concepto de las llamadas comunidades virtuales (VCs) desde una perspectiva teórica y empírica. Queremos ofrecer una definición desde la investigación secundaria que puede ser útil a nivel teórico y empírico. Además, la comparamos con la definición que surge de las entrevistas, que es típica de la perspectiva del enfoque cualitativo. Las preguntas investigativas (RQs) son: (1) ¿Cómo se puede definir una VC?; y (2) ¿Cómo definen una VC sus usuarios? Utilizamos la tipología de VCs de Porter para seleccionar cuatro estudios de caso y realizamos 49 entrevistas a fondo con sus miembros. Nuestro estudio apunta a la aplicabilidad y utilidad de la tipología de comunidades virtuales de Porter y sugiere un nuevo enfoque para definir el concepto VC. Palabras clave: comunidades virtuales, Web 2.0, comunidades online, investigación cualitativa, estudio de caso múltiple.

Exploring the Nature of Virtuality

IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, 2007

There has been considerable interest in the topic of virtuality over the last few years among both academics and practitioners. The focus of attention has generally been on how to improve collaboration and knowledge sharing, how to develop trust and cohesiveness within virtual organizations, virtual teams and virtual communities, and how to best support virtual interactions. Underlying this research area is the assumption that we possess sufficient understanding about the nature of virtuality and that we know how to distinguish 'what is virtual' to 'what is not virtual'. Even though several of us have attempted on various occasions to make a contribution in this field, we increasingly recognize that the nature of virtuality has not been well conceptualized in the literature. Part of the reason for this is that researchers, including us, often have the tendency to compare the virtual (distributed and CMCbased) to the traditional (collocated, and face-to-face) environment. We question this purely technological distinction, but recognize that virtuality, as an IT-enabled phenomenon, is increasingly extending its reach, becoming more global and more pervasive across all spheres of society. The theme of this panel is to examine, appreciate, and debate the multi-dimensional nature of what virtuality has been, is, and may become-specifically, its global and local dimensions, including the different interpretations that are and should be given to these dimensions.

Virtuality as the Ideality of the Information Society

2018

From the philosophical and cultural point of view, the dynamically changing environment of the information society is considered, in which the tendencies of the emerging ideational culture system of the 21st century are revealed. The concepts of "virtual environment" and "virtuality" are divided. The virtual environment is represented as a technogenic information environment, the virtuality – as an idea abstracted from its technical embodiment and as a space of collective meanings. The ideality of modern society is revealed through three possible models of virtuality, described in the artistic and esoteric literature, as well as presented in feature films.

Mapping the Virtual in Social Sciences: On the Category of "Virtual Community"

Lately the term "virtual" has been used more and more frequently by both scholars and journalists to refer to social phenomena and entities. Quite representative of this trend is the phrase "virtual community" which has been rapidly accepted in common language. However, its use by social scientists raises many questions. Since the words "virtual" and "community" are both polysemic, what exactly might the term "virtual community" mean? And what new kind of collectivity is it supposed to circumscribe? Doesn't it imply a sort of nostalgia for a mythical form of community, along with an idealization of face-to-face interactions? This paper attempts to offer some elements of solution to these questions by means of a critical examination of recent social science texts.

Local Virtuality in an Organization: Implications for Community of Practice

Communities and Technologies 2005, 2005

This volume consists of the papers presented at the second international conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T 2005). After a very successful first conference in 2003 in Amsterdam, the second one attracted about the same number of submissions and workshop proposals. This suggests that the scholarly interest in the relationships between communities and technologies is lasting, and that the C&T conference has become a major international forum for presenting and discussing this work.

Virtuality as place and process

Journal of Marketing Management, 2013

Virtual worlds are conventionally understood as representational places, or alternate realities more or less set apart from the real world. However, in considering new and emergent technologies, such as social media sites and augmented reality devices, which complicate any easy distinction between virtual and real, we contend that virtuality should also be understood as a matter of process, or the means by which virtualisation is realised. Focusing on theorisations clustered around Baudrillard's theory of simulation, we compare Baudrillardian concepts to other possible theorisations in order to shed light on practices including transmediation and information management at the dawning of the age of Big Data.

Virtual communities - why and how are they studied

We are entering a time when technological development seems to overwhelm us all in almost every area of our lives. One of the most expansive fields is the new global communication network known as Cyberspace or the Net. Cyberspace makes new ways to meet, to communicate, to work, to shop, and to live possible.

Virtual Institutes: Between Immersion and Communication

Computational Visualistics, Media Informatics, and Virtual Communities, 2003

In the two expressions "virtual reality" and "virtual community", the term "virtual" has different meanings. A virtual reality is a depiction or, more generally speaking, a sensuous representation of reality that allows -mainly by means of interactivity -to experience various features of reality without actually being in contact with the reality depicted. Therefore, any interactive depiction that is able to imitate reality to such an extent that a high degree of sensory-motor immersion becomes possible is called a virtual reality (Heim 1998, 6f). Since reality is always much more complex than its depiction and full of unpredictable surprises, hardly ever a user has doubts about the difference between the depiction and the thing depicted. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for preferring the imitation to the reality: at least, the imitation is usually not as dangerous as reality sometimes turns out to be.

Rethinking virtuality in a digital media age

Prologi, 2017

Scholars have studied virtuality in teams and organizations for over two decades. The term “virtual” is often used loosely and imprecisely, and theoretical debates have flourished over what differentiates virtual from non-virtual teams. In these debates, scholarship has not explicitly considered the significant ways in which the technological landscape has changed over this time. While the virtual is often treated as a separate space from “real”, physical or face-to-face interaction, the increasing technological saturation of our lives has resulted in a blurring of online and offline worlds such that these distinctions may no longer hold up. I will explore whether the term “virtuality” still has currency and the ways in which we must rethink our underlying assumptions about virtuality in a digital media age.