What is an online community (and can we eat it)?

“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 relationship in cyberspace” (quoted in Wilbur 1997 pg. 5)."

the only responsibility is not to be nasty and make personal attack on posters for no reasons whatsover.

The thing is if you gonna post just post: even if you think some ppl will think its dumb or stupid or insulting because some might not actually.

The responsibility of individuals to the group is to encourage interaction among members of the group. The responsibility of the group to individuals is non-existent; the group is not required to change its ways to satisfy members who have become tired of the group.

I think that online communities do take on characteristics and "lives" of their own independent of the people who make them up, largely because it is a distillation of the wide range of personalities which make up the group and the personalities in the group is constantly in flux. Overall "rules of communication" arise partially from existing social convention and partially because they are the most successful at encouraging others to respond.

OTM!

Honestly, isn't this what Ronan's thread is really about? Is there an answer we can come up that will satisfy everyone or (more importantly) change people's minds about how ILXOR should operate?

The question I ask:

If there were no meet-ups would an online community be that strong?

So, I might not care as much if my old skool posse didn't post here, but I would probably still be here if they all left and I'd probably act the same way.

Another aspect of community, is what about lurkers/googlers? In my view they are part of the community, as they constitute the audience. What we say on these boards is in someway influenced by this audience.

Me personally, I know I would post if there were no FAPS, but my experince of online community is that it's the coolest thing to be able to meet up with the people you talk to online

Quite a lot -- it was in vogue in the mid-90s -- but a lot of it was extremely superficial, and not much more than cataloguing of differences between online friendships and off (online romances received particular attention). At a time when most supervisors and audiences were pretty net-illiterate, it was easy to get any kind of "study of online communities" approved (says he who did exactly that :))

The relative "weight" of a given participant is often subjective, though -- for all we know, there were five or six guys off in the corner at Cheers with zany adventures all their own.

We could batter this one to pieces all year I think. I agree this is part of what my post was about but I think alot of people overlooked the aspect of it which dealt with simply what happens when you begin to get irritated by the board.

I fully admit that it is my own sensitivity/hang ups that stop me 'embracing' the board or whatever, and not perhaps anyone else's fault. It's out of character for me to even type this. And of course it's true that one can always leave for a while blah blah. But 'community' - 'social intercourse; communion; fellowship; sense of common identity'? Hm. There's just too many people here for anything cohesive, I think, and if for some reason I had to give up my RL friends and throw myself on the mercy of ILX? Well I wouldn't.

That's all. (I really *do* still like it here on other levels.)

It's nice if there is give and take among members, but that's true of any community.

Dan (since I know you will read this thread), I want to ask if you are going to answer your questions here. Not becaue I'm holding a grudge, but because I've always been interested in what you had to say about it and I imagine you were wanting to talk about it when you started the discussion.

I feel its a community in lots of ways, but one that I'm only on the fringes of. That's partly a result of not meeting people on here in person, partly a result of only being here for a few months, partly a result of not always having the time to post when I would like to.

But I also find that strange given the amount of my time and thoughts this place takes up. If its not a community or if I'm not a part of it, what am I doing?

(And I'm as much involved in the ILX community as anyone else but I hardly ever post 'personal' things here so I completely take your first point - but I think online communities are both shallower and richer than real-life ones for lacking that personal aspect)

I love the new users and think it is good for the community. I think it helps when people are familiar with basic Netiquette (reading FAQs and stuff) (USENET IN THE HizzOUSE) but it's not necessarily fair to expect a new generation to be familiar with that when commercial websites are so user-friendly nowadays. Online communities will have to evolve to adapt to new kinds of users to survive.

Sometimes, in the icier recesses of my heart, I wonder what would happen if we suffered a good old-fashioned Greenspun-style server failure of yore from time to time. I missed ILX desperately at those time, but it definitely made me appreciate it more.

Yes, there are a lot of people that would be a lot more territorial and dictatorial if the boards had been their idea from the beginning, but Tom has usually given people a lot of freedom and leeway to use the boards the way they want to.

Tom's modesty is becoming. Becoming what, I don't know.

I come to ILE for many reasons. It depends on what sort of mood I'm in. I'm thankful that I haven't been too harshly attacked. I mean, it's kind of annoying hearing so much hate about cat pic threads as it is something that I do REALLY and truly enjoy, but at least no one has told me to fuck off (unless I missed that post...).

ILE is very much a community for me. I get on ILE every day, Monday thru Friday at work and tend to have it open my entire workday, posting on and off. I have really enjoyed getting to know other posters by the frequency of their posts and I feel like when/(if) I meet them it will not be like meeting strangers at all. Of course, there are a lot of posters, but I'm learning about more of them one at a time. And I hope that other posters see me as a person in this community as well.

I understand that people's feelings get hurt and people get angry and start threads about it... I really wish there was less of that. But everyone knows I'm a kitten-loving, mush-filled, vegetarian skirt that is enjoying Valentine's Day.

I think this is how it goes offline too. I don't know if that's good or bad. But there are ways to be honest about things that piss you off without seeming to turn on people, and if you're talking to individuals then a public messageboard is inherently NOT the right forum for that. It smacks of public humiliation too much.

I feel the same way as Archel and alext, or more like alext, in terms of being part of a community. I come here looking more for discussion/entertainment/education than friendships to carry on offline.

The phenomenon I find interesting is how attached I feel to people I've never met. The messages of sympathy to and affection for posters here that I've posted are entirely genuine and heartfelt, and it makes little sense to me that I can feel anything much for people in these circumstances. I do see this as a good thing, I should add, in case it looks as if I'm complaining.