Friday 18 January 2013

Sense of Virtual Community: Antecedents and Implications for Community Management

In 2004 Blanchard & Marcus presented their qualitative study of an online community (a member-initiated newsgroup for multiple sport enthusiasts) and introduced the concept of "sense of virtual community" (SOVC). SOVC in a virtual setting is basically the equivalent of McMillan and Chavis' (1986) sense of community observable in real neighbourhoods and face-to-face communities of interest, but there are some differences.

Friday 4 January 2013

Congrats! 2013 is the 20th anniversary of Howard Rheingold's book "The Virtual Community"

For people who haven't yet read the book, here is the link to the html-version on Howard Rheingold's homepage: http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html.

My favourite part of the book is chapter 10: Disinformocracy. And this is how it opens:

"Virtual communities could help citizens revitalize democracy, or they could be luring us into an attractively packaged substitute for democratic discourse."

In 1987 Howard Rheingold wrote the article "Virtual Communities - exchanging ideas through computer bulletin boards". It seems that this article is the first known publication of the term "virtual community".