LZZR

Online Communities - Notes on Terminology

Having to read masses of texts written on the subject of Online Communities I had to face the sad fact that we are all hopelessly confused by the overwhelming amount of information coming from all sides and terminological mess arising from our inability to grasp the meaning of the emerging phenomena doesn’t help a bit in our attempts to catch up with events. As it always happens in moments like this buzz words tend to spring up from every corner of the field quite naturally reflecting the need to name something that only just came to exist. Being rather natural product of the course of events buzz words are just that, buzz words, that came into circulation spontaneously out of scarcity but not as a result of regular analytic attempts. Clear and transparent terms reflecting at least to a some degree the meaning of phenomena are clear signs of the maturity of the field and can provide an invaluable help in our attempts to rationalise the stream of events. Although some of the thoughts presented here might look obvious or banal to some I nevertheless find an attempt to sort out terminological mess a very timely mental exercise even if only for my own sake. Far from being an Internet guru I just first of all need to put my own thinking in order . So, look through the list of terms I find problematic and hopefully this will help sorting at least some things out.

Social Network - perhaps the most abused term in the current thinking of the subject as in free circulation it is being applied to such a wide range of things that its meaning gets almost entirely diluted, hence it seems to be particularly important to return to its strict definition. Being in the centre of all related notions it provides a good pretext for a discussion that is no less relevant for all other terms I am about to list here. Needless to remind, that the term itself had originated within Social Science and has more to do with such disciplines as Social Anthropology and Sociology than with the subject of Online Communities. There it refers to relationships forming between real people in real social context and most importantly the analysis of those real Social Networks is only a small part of the whole which in its entirety includes much more important factors like age, class, gender, kinship and so on, of which those networks are just a direct function. The way this term is currently applied and used in various writings about the Internet (and Web 2.0 in particular) supposes a completely different set of circumstances. Understandably there are certain Online Communities, of which Facebook is probably the best possible example, that are formed with an intention to become a mere digital reflection of pre-existing real-world Social Networks hence their insistence on real names as opposed to nicknames and pictures instead of avatars coupled with an attempt to establish a self-policing community that enforces referential integrity with offline relationships from within. Of course this type of online communities is a dreamland for every advertiser and every PR agency. Having clear and direct correspondence between a user and a real person reinforced by the ability to visualise and analyse real-world relationships between them provides the owner of such dataset with potentially unlimited power and influence in real world which can be actualised at any moment in a huge variety of ways. Luckily for all of us Facebook and various facebookoids are no more than just unfortunate exceptions and the online game is played by completely different rules. The Internet is a place inhabited by avatars, nicknames in imaginary locations not by real names and social security numbers acting from real zip codes. It’s cyberspace after all, innit? Whatever draconian measures those control freaks from Facebook might implement to enforce their sick ideas about real names and locations, even there they had to have a cow as one of their accounts. To cut it short, on the Net we are not dealing with real people, instead we are presented with certain facets of real-world individuals designed and structured in the way that suits the purpose best. It’s only natural that the same individual would have radically different profiles on say job seeking portal, parents association, professional community and ultimately on an adult dating site. Should I mention that it is customary to own more than one profile or identity in the same community or service? Now, the relationships that can be established in Online Communities are of a different nature too. Various Facebookoid fanatics are quick to offer us online services where virtual relationships can only be instrumental applied to relationships pre-existing in the real world. Real world relationships and true social networks do exist without their virtual part and what virtual networks do for them can be viewed only as means of facilitation capable of intensifying them but not essential for their very existence. That’s how they want to see it. Luckily again the internet is not one big Facebook and most of the relationships forming there are virtual ones. The test that can be applied to distinguish between the two is in one simple question: will the relationship under examination exist if the whole Internet with its Online Communities will suddenly disappear? If it continues functioning albeit in a reduced form, the relationship belongs to the real world, and on the other hand if it ceases to continue it is a true virtual online relationship. Certainly there is a full spectrum of possible combinations between the two extremes but the essence and the beauty of the internet is precisely in its ability to generate this specific type of relationships hardly ever possible in real world. To put it straight the difference comes from the fact that online communication is capable of generating new relationships independent from those arising otherwise in real world. In other words relationships that are possible in virtual world are often absolutely impossible in real one. Needless to say that most of them are not transferable to the real world too. They simply can not actualise in the real world as they would invariably meet a huge number of various obstacles. Funny enough obstacles of true social nature like age, class, social and educational background and so on will be playing the most prominent role. Consequently, relationships forming in online world are capable of crisscrossing the real world relationships and in many instances are openly opposing them. If someone needs more explicit interpretation of the latter statement think of an online flirting or a virtual infidelity in marriage (quite a widespread phenomenon of late) where existing social relationships contradict online activity and online activity as such is rarely being actualised in real world.
Admittedly, this buzz word is so powerful that earlier on I named this very section of my blog Social Networks. Mea Culpa! And alas, it is much too late now to change this.

Virtual Community - although Wikipedia places this along with terms e-community or online community in the same row as synonyms it contradicts itself in the very same sentence defining it as a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as letters, telephone, email or Usenet rather than face to face. Taking it as a working definition, i. e. defining Virtual Community as any community that exists without immediate interaction, one can’t fail noticing that terms e-community or online community are of the different taxonomic level being just subsets of the former. Some other examples of Virtual Community one might think of would be for example armature groups or car-to-car radio users communicating over radio waves. So, all communities depending on a certain media can be called virtual, which reminds me again of Social Science where the term Imaginary Communities gained significant popularity with a slightly different meaning.

Online Community - the article in Wikipedia cited above also provides the following definition for this term: If the mechanism is a computer network, it is called an online community. Funny enough in strict terms this definition is problematic as well if one remembers a long dead FIDOnet that is at the same time a computer network but also a classic example of offline communication and even Usenet to a large degree too. Hence less contradictory seems using terms Internet Community or Web Community as they reflect the meaning in a much better way. Sadly as the same Wikipedia tells us the latter had been taken already with the meaning of an online community established by a business with a purpose of facilitating that same business. So, we are only left with one precise term Internet Community which Wikipedia shamelessly redirects to the mentioned above Virtual Community article. Having to choose between the conventional Online Community and more precise Internet Community I would of course favour the latter but the power of tradition and already established practice in this case seems much too strong to go against, so for the time being I’ll be using both terms intermittently turning a blind eye on the imprecise mature of the former.

Online Community Service - if the term Online Community covers all those who act as members of the said community, this term should logically mean the vehicle of communication through which the functioning of the community is actualised. For example services like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Jaiky etc, etc emptied of all their users would fall under this category whilst each of them taken separately could also be rightly named Online || Internet Community Host which reflects better their place and function.

Social Network Service - in a very sad way this Wikipedia article assigns the meaning that should rightly be referred to by the previous term to this one. The reason why it seems to be completely misguiding should be apparent from the note on Social Network.

Social Graph - a term introduced to the field by Brad Fitzpatrick in his now infamous Thoughts on the Social Graph article seems to me particularly unfortunate. Correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I am able to grasp the concept, these two words are supposed to denote a user centric set of data that consists of friends of a given user and user identities from a potentially unlimited number of Online Communities. If this is so, than both of these words are completely out of place. Firstly the adjective Social pre-supposes real social relationships forming in real world while in fact what we are able to observe online are specific relationships that can only be formed and maintained via the media of the Internet. Secondly the term Graph is not only extremely user-unfriendly, but also carries a misleading connotation to visual representation of relationships while in fact it might only refer to a set of data regardless of the way the data are represented in each particular case. As the term itself just appeared there is still a window of opportunity allowing to replace this combination of words with something that would better reflect the meaning of the notion as well as be more user friendly. Having in mind that the question of naming still remains open, I would nevertheless like to propose an alternative term I grew accustomed to use in my work. I certainly think that calling the same phenomenon User Circle is much more preferable as in my opinion the former part of the term reflects better the user centric nature of it whilst the latter leaves more room for manoeuvre allowing to denote not only visual representation but any form of data related to a single user. In addition placing a user at the centre of the term we are intentionally cutting off unwanted connotations to social side of things postulating an online nature of our data this way. Although the term Social Graph had been already issued and is currently in circulation I will meanwhile stick to my guns until a better alternative is on offer.

User Circle - a term that in my opinion reflects much better the meaning Brad Fitzpatrick was trying to assign to his Social Graph concept. Firstly, the word user much more precisely positions a user in the centre of a dataset as well as carries the right connotation not to a real-world individual, but to a user of an internet service. Secondly, the word circle is flexible enough to include various forms of data representation ranging from a complex graph, to a simple list of friends or any other data, thus being much more adequate in daily usage. And last but not least the term itself seems to be much more user-friendly and more likely to be picked up by an average user.

Oh, and did I mention that this whole post acts as a kind of a preface to a series of articles on the subject of Online Communities that are in progress as we speak? I didn’t? I do now.

Added 23.12.2007
When I was in the middle of writing my next post I realised that I desperately need another term to describe adequately my new idea. Once again, I am not after introducing the I propose to any sort of wider circulation, I just need them to be able to express some new concepts in clear and unambiguous way.

User - an active party accessing an online service through proper authorisation procedure. Why do we need to define this additional term? Simply because it is the only adequate term capable of signifying the right meaning. From the side of our system be it for administrative purposes or in our analytic activity we have no means to know and no grounds to insist that it is always the same real world individual, in fact we can not even state that it is an individual at all. There can be plenty of various combinations. To list just a few instances: user account that is used by several family members, accounts held by institutions/organisations managed by a number of authorised employees, accounts passed from one individual to another etc. Individuals having multiple different accounts at the same online service tend to complicate the picture even further. Even if via indirect evidence we can suspect that such accounts belong to the same individual/group for our purposes they remain separate users. So the working definition of user might be as follows: someone (or something) who is able to log in to our system under the same username/password combination. Another purely instrumental term could be introduced in relation to this one. An individual who is acting under a given username/password combination at any given time can be called an account operator. The difference is that it denotes not a user as we see from the side of an online service administrator but an acting agency on the client side. To illustrate the difference suppose I step back from the computer and during the same session give access to an online service to my wife and she sends a message to her friend from this account. On the client side my previous actions and the message sent by my wife are performed by different account operators whilst on the server side they are performed by the same user! In other words the term user reflects what happens on the server side while the term account operator denotes what really happens on the client side. The only problem that things that really happen on the client side are completely beyond the scope of our knowledge as service operators hence the term itself has only instrumental significance in our analysis.

Added 29.02.2007
Writing on Web history I came to realise that there are two more terms that need to be included in this list. Although being discussed in detail in my next post they are still needed to be repeated here if only for the sake of consistency.

Surfer - the most generic state of online presence characterised by NOT being logged in into any particular online system or service – the most anonymous and passive with read-only access.

Legal Self - a state in which a User provides real-life credentials in order to make a legally binding transaction. In this state only a user can be traced back to a real-life individual.

tags: facebook, internet, legal self, myspace, online community, online community service, social graph, social network, social network service, surfer, user, user circle, virtual community, web 2.0, web history, community, guru, network, online, social

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Posted by LZZR under Social Networks |