Virtual Community

Primary Contributor: Howard Lee Rheingold

virtual community, a group of people, who may or may not meet one another face to face, who exchange words and ideas through the mediation of computer bulletin board systems (BBSs) and other digital networks.


The first use of the phrase virtual community appeared in a 1987 article written by Howard Rheingold for The Whole Earth Review. In The Virtual Community (1993), Rheingold expanded on his article to offer the following definition:

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 in cyberspace.

This article and book are cited as the foundational works of cyberculture studies. Many subsequent commentators have contested Rheingold’s use of the word community and the terminology used to describe the technosocial phenomena of persistent computer-mediated relationships; social media and participatory media are also used to describe a very broad variety of human social activity online.

The first predictions of communities of computer-linked individuals and groups were made in 1968 by J.C.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, who as research administrators for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) set in motion the research that resulted in the creation of the first such community, the ARPANET, which was the precursor of the Internet. Licklider and Taylor wrote,

What will on-line interactive communities be like? In most fields they will consist of geographically separated members, sometimes grouped in small clusters and sometimes working individually. They will be communities not of common location, but of common interest.

Even before the ARPANET, in the early 1960s, the PLATO computer-based education system included online community features. Douglas Engelbart, who ran the ARPANET’s first Network Information Center, had grown a “bootstrapping community” at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), located at Stanford University in California, through use of his pioneering oNLine System (NLS) before the ARPANET was launched.

By the beginning of the 21st century, the four computer nodes (University of California at Los Angeles, SRI, University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah) that constituted the ARPANET community in 1969 had expanded to include some one billion people with access to the Internet. With several billion mobile telephones now in existence and a growing trend toward building Internet connections into mobile devices, it is not unlikely that a significant portion of the human population will conduct some of their social affairs by means of computer networks. The range of networked activities has greatly expanded since Rheingold described BBSs, chat rooms, mailing lists, USENET newsgroups, and MUDs (multiuser dungeons) in 1993. In the 21st century, people meet, play, conduct discourse, socialize, do business, and organize collective action through instant messages, blogs (including videoblogs), RSS feeds (a format for subscribing to and receiving regularly updated content from Web sites), wikis, social network services such as MySpace and Facebook, photo and media-sharing communities such as Flickr, massively multiplayer online games such as Lineage and World of Warcraft, and immersive virtual worlds such as Second Life. Virtual communities and social media have coevolved as emerging technologies have afforded new kinds of interaction and as different groups of people have appropriated media for new purposes.

The emergence of globally networked publics has raised a number of psychological, sociological, economic, and political issues, and these issues have in turn stimulated the creation of new courses and research programs in social media, virtual communities, and cyberculture studies. In particular, the widespread use of online communication tools has raised questions of identity and the presentation of self, community or pseudocommunity, collective action, public sphere, social capital, and quality of attention.
A number of different critiques arose as cyberculture studies emerged. A political critique of early online activism questioned whether online relationships offered a kind of comforting simulation of collective action. On close inspection, the question of what actually defines a community has turned out to be complex: American sociologist George A. Hillery, Jr., compiled 92 different definitions. Canadian sociologist Barry Wellman defined community as “networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging, and social identity” and offered empirical evidence that at least some virtual communities fit these criteria. As has happened in the past, what people mean when they speak of community is shifting.

As the early digital enthusiasts, builders, and researchers were joined by a more representative sample of the world’s population, a broader and not always wholesome representation of human behaviour manifested itself online. Life online in the 21st century enabled terrorists and various cybercriminals to make use of the same many-to-many digital networks that enable support groups for disease victims and caregivers, disaster relief action, distance learning, and community-building efforts. Soldiers in battle taunt their enemies with text messages, disseminate information through instant messaging, and communicate home through online videos. With so many young people spending so much of their time online, many parents and “real world” community leaders expressed concerns about the possible effects of overindulging in such virtual social lives. In addition, in an environment where anyone can publish anything or make any claim online, the need to include an understanding of social media in education has given rise to advocates for “participatory pedagogy.”
Students of online social behaviour have noted a shift from “group-centric” characterizations of online socializing to a perspective that takes into account “networked individualism.” Again, quoting Wellman:

Although people often view the world in terms of groups, they function in networks. In networked societies: boundaries are permeable, interactions are with diverse others, connections switch between multiple networks, and hierarchies can be flatter and recursive.…Most people operate in multiple, thinly-connected, partial communities as they deal with networks of kin, neighbours, friends, workmates and organizational ties. Rather than fitting into the same group as those around them, each person has his/her own “personal community.”

It is likely that community-centred forms of online communication will continue to flourish in the medical community alone, mutual support groups will continue to afford strong and persistent bonds between people whose primary communications take place online. At the same time, it is also likely that the prevalence of individual-centred social network services and the proliferation of personal communication devices will feed the evolution of “networked individualism.” Cyberculture studies, necessarily an interdisciplinary pursuit, is likely to continue to grow as more human socialization is mediated by digital networks.