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Over the course of the next few weeks, I will be taking a detailed look into the phenomenon that is known as the Online Community; what it is, and what the Good, the Bad and the Ugly sides of it are. I shall also be looking at the trends and what it’s implications are for Global and Local Societies and Industries.

This week, I’ll be looking at the premise behind Online Communities, and what the inherent need was that these Virtual Societies have answered.

Humans are social animals, and the said aspect has become a part and parcel of their daily lives. As they go on through life, they tend to stick within communities, relate themselves to their peers, create friendships and form various cliques. It is with these communities, cliques, peers and friends that they interact and communicate, and drive a sense of satisfaction and completion. This sense of contentment is driven by the acceptance that individuals derive from those that surround them, and this acceptance even forms an important part of the famous Maslow pyramid of human self-actualization. It hence becomes a little surprising that as technology and the Internet tighten their grip over the world; the level of human interactions continues to decrease. Online Virtual Communities are now the rage, and seem to be slowly but surely creating an ever growing niche for themselves.

It is not surprising that technology has given us the freedom to sit on our PCs and still be able to interact with someone possibly in Australia, but what has been surprising has been the fact that it has decreased the levels of face-to-face and physical communication. But before we look at the baggage that online communities carry with themselves, let’s find out what exactly constitutes an online community.

The What!

The most definitive description of an online or a virtual community revolves around an online, Internet or Intranet based community, existing through the interactions of the individuals within that community, all of whom communicate solely through the internet. These online communications attempt to simulate all of the intricacies of a face-to-face physical interaction, and allow for an exchange of conversations, ideas and opinion without any constraint with regards to geographical location. As a result of the said freedom, online communities are able to take on a number of personas. They can be development oriented, as showcased by the massive online communities that collaboratively produce open source code, or they can be based on the need for social networking, such as Facebook, Orkut, Linked In and its likes. Online communities can even be entire virtual cities, such as the Warcraft Universe or Second Life.

Just as they can be utilized for a number of areas, a virtual community can be structured to allow for different degrees of social interactions. The participation of the individuals within the community can range from simply adding comments to forums and blogs, to having interactive conversations in chat rooms, to competing with players from all over the world in simulated gaming environments such as Warcraft or X-Box Live.

Typical to human psychology, some of these communities further break up to form cliques and communities within communities. Some of the newer more popular communities are not as structured as traditional communities, such as message boards and their likes; rather, they form a looser, individual-centric bottom up community, which seems to work best as a social tool. Blogs and IMs (such as MSN, Yahoo, and Google Talk) are prime examples of the latter approach.

The basic dynamics of online communities were researched by Peter Kollock in 1999, and his four principles revolved around Anticipated Reciprocity, which basically implies that one person will contribute valuable information with hope that he/she will receive valuable information as well or quid pro quo; Increased Reputation, which implies that users want recognition and equity for their contributions and want to make name for themselves; Sense of Efficacy, which implies that by contributing useful information to a group, an individual may believe that he is contributing to the environment; and finally a Sense of Community, which takes us back to our original reasoning of social interaction driving communities.

There is also something of a cyclic direction to how communities develop and are sustained. Initially, newly formed communities will grow slowly, and fewer members will contribute, as the attraction for contributing is very low due to the lower audience size of the community. But as the community grows, the motivation level of contributors goes up, as they have a bigger audience to write for, and hence more and more members contribute regularly. Generally speaking, the bigger the community, the greater the amount of contributions, and the greater the motivation to contribute.

Next week: In Part 2, I take a look at the Good side of Online Communities.

This week’s rant-of-the-week goes out to the people behind Flare Magazine in Islamabad. The said people have been ripping of articles and forums from the Pakistan Blogosphere and publishing them without giving credit due to the authors. What’s more, they are claiming it as their own content. Have a look here for some of the shenanigans of Flare. Now let’s visit the dictionary and find out what this is. Very simply, it’s called Plagiarism, and it happens to be the greatest sin when it comes to writers and people who want to be writers. The so called ‘writers’ of the magazine are making money and getting sponsorships by stealing other people’s content. This is the very reason we are so far behind the world when it comes to intellectually property and content. It’s all because of irresponsible and lazy people calling themselves writers. Over the last few years, the Pakistan Blogosphere has come a long way in terms of having quality content Online (with websites such as telecompk.net), going a step in the right direction to communicate the positive reality that is in Pakistan to the world, but such blatant disregard will only discourage more authors from publishing online and will be a backward step for the Pakistani Writers Community.

Flare Magazine should be black listed by Telecom Companies giving them so many advertisements, and they should be made an example of so that others take notice.

Till next week, stay safe and beLIEve.

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