Discuss the concept of new
media communities
SCHOOL OF INFORMATION SCIENCES
DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION SCIENCES
GROUP TWO II
GROUP TWO II
Introduction
New media communities refer to places on the web where
people can find and then electronically “talk” to others with similar interests
but are not physically bound together. These communities brought together forms
a network society. Therefore, for one to understand the communities, you also
need to understand the network society.
Community is a group of people living in the
same place or having a particular characteristic in common (oxford dictionary).
New media community is places on the web where people can
find and then electronically “talk” to others with similar interests but are
not physically bound together. It is similar to the virtual community. People
can form communities such as the twitter community, Facebook community with all
having a common interest of social interaction. Communities form a network
society.
Society is the aggregate of people living
together in a more or less ordered community and having shared customs, laws
and organizations (oxford dictionary).
Network society is a society whose social structure is
made up of networks powered by micro-electronics-based information and
communications technologies.' As Castells shows in his book, historically,
there have always been social networks: the key factor that distinguishes the
network society is that the use of ICTs helps to create and sustain far-flung
networks in which new kinds of social relationships are created (Manuel
Castells, 2004 p. 3).
Core
attributes of new media communities
· A
shared goal, interest, need, or activity which is the primary reason for
belonging to the community;
· Repeated,
active participation, and often, intense interactions, strong emotional ties,
and shared activities among participants;
· Access
to shared resources, and policies determining the access to those resources;
· Reciprocity
of information, support, and services among members;
· Shared
context of social conventions, language, and protocols.
Some people view new media communities as a form of online
citizenship and that it helps build confidence and reach out for others and
communicate with them .and that it is substitute for offline communities and
friendship which is unhealthy for the individual and offline communities.
Although new media communities can be fun, there is no real commitment on some
of them. Hence new media communities mean unity and support but perhaps
no commitment. New media communities provide utility in public life for people
with issue of isolation.
Formation on new media communities
In determining how new media communities are formed, a
social network analysis is used. It provides a vocabulary and set of techniques
for examining interaction patterns between people and has proven useful for
studying health (e.g. how relationships are maintained without physical
co-presence, and the development of new, health care-related online networks.
diagram above shows how new media communities are formed
The basic principles of social network analysis are derived
from graph theory and consider actors (e.g. people, organizations) as
nodes in a network, connected by relations (what they do with each
other, e.g., provide new information, emotional support, resources, and/or
services) that form interpersonal ties. The nature and variety of
relations define the kind of relationship between actors, such as an
acquaintanceship, friendship, learning, or work relationship. Research has
shown that the closer the relationship, the more different types of exchanges
are maintained and the more important these exchanges are for the individuals;
close personal relationships also demonstrate a higher level of intimacy and
self-disclosure. Such ties are strong ties, and pairs who are strongly
tied are more motivated to share their resources with each other. These pairs
also turn out to be more like each other (more homophilous), with the result
that they tend to know and associate with similar others. Weak ties, by
contrast, are less motivated to share their resources but are more likely to
have access to resources different from each other because they do not share
similar habits, circles of friends, etc. Pairwise relationships build into the
social networks that are recognized as cliques,groups, and communities.
·
Network representation of a New media community
TYPES OF NEW MEDIA COMMUNITIES
Distributed Communities-Utopians
Gochenour (2006), states that as long as humans communicate,
they form communities. Community, from this standpoint, is contingent on
communication.
Inside the huge community of Internet users, inside this new
environment, a natural process of differentiation occurs and new beings are
born. They form structures, they try to organize themselves and, the same as in
the living world, they survive or not, and have a longer or a shorter life.
Sometimes, the initial goal set by the creators of a community is modified, in
time, by the citizens of that community: e.g. a local dating website may turn
into a giant social network, or a small community of knowledge may turn into a
major information source, class WhatsApp group turned into platform for
discussing football.
Secondly, Gochenour (2006), talks about an important shift.
In the typical experience of online community, rather than turning to the
internet to become members of specifically new media community, they were using
it as infrastructure to communicate with a geographically distributed network of
friends and family”. A distributed network has a grid-like structure, and all
the points in that structure are nodal subjects. If you eliminate some nodal
points that does not mean that a part of the structure remains unconnected to
the other. The network can always re-arrange things in a convenient manner. My
Facebook profile, for instance, includes friends (the large majorities are
Kenyans) that live across the world. Every nodal subject has a network of his
own, and thus we have a distributed community. Facebook is a network of
networks, and when you enter such a network (when you stop at a nodal point)
you are connected to a lot of other nodal points.Surfing Facebook gives the
feeling of one going not just to a place; you enter a huge and developing network
of networks, a huge distributed community
Thirdly, Gochenour talks about “movement towards action” and
community rights. People can associate themselves online, create discussion
forums, make statements, take initiatives, create political structures, argue
on blogs and set up “in real life” meetings. New media communities can also be
seen as a starting point for all the “real” actions that we know: for instance,
a virtual community could end up as a classical political party or a forum for
helping needy people like those with cancer. Distributed communities have a
better potential to take things further (as in democratic debates, for example)
than that of centralized networks and decentralized networks.
*Distributed community
Functional Communities
People decide to be apart of these communities in order to
satisfy their needs, desires, to get information, to find out what is
trending.This functional dimension can be commercial, entertainment, business,
career and self-improvement, health, knowledge or even political. These
communities do have a meaning for those entering them.
One individual can adhere to multiple communities, a lot of
groups are formed, and everything is just very dynamic. Many scholars have
argued that in the case of New Media, we have weak ties, and that the real
phenomenon is network individualism not community. The analysis of the
functional dimension, dystopians could say, reveals the fact that people decide
to enter the virtual communities only for individual /selfish reasons. And that
they use them mainly when they need them.
Utopians could counter-attack by saying that not all the
members in a community have the network individualism kind of behavior. Also,
utopians can point to the fact that online communities have helped the
existing/real/offline groups organize themselves and, in many cases, new
offline communities were born .Functionally , virtual communities can support
the offline communities, they can be a tool to preserve or improve the offline
communities (the case with local online newspapers, for instance).
(Fernback, 2007: 51), More individualistic behaviors can, in
time, give way to real participation, solidarity and strong ties: some driver
that entered an online community in order to get discounts from fellow members
that sell car parts may turn into an active member that attends all the car
shows in which his club/community is involved or an individual who get into
twitter to check trending events can become an active participants by providing
comments to such tweets.
3 Diluted Communities
For the deeper questions of life, most of them are not
answered online and that what happens through New Media leads to the formation
of some sort of communities, that’s not enough. He argues that the community
metaphor has a limit. It does not matter its offline or online. Oppressiveness
can be a problem either online or offline. Some internet users “cyber bully”
and may cause others to leave online communities because they feel attacked,
marginalized or humiliated. This metaphor is one of the fellowships, respect
and tolerance but these qualities only describe a fraction of culturally
understood ideas about a community (Fernback, 2007: 61).
There is an issue about private and public life in new media
hence Dystopians argue that people seeking for social intimacy is delusive and
nostalgic. The use of the word community is abusive and that what happens
online is social interaction and the best description is diluted form of community
in which few characteristic of the old traditional community are present. The fluidity
and flexibility features of the internet allow people to join and leave
new media community at every moment. And that the aftermath of leaving the community
except for cases of corporate communication is not big deal as compared to
leaving a physical community. And something happening in the network may turn
out to be individualism and really a community issue.
The easiness of joining and leaving is a proof of a diluted
form of a community. Fernback recommends that it’s important to think of this
aspect of new media in terms of commitment rather than as a
community(how it is formed, how it is manifested in the case of online and
offline relationships.
Jakob Nielsen 90-9-1 rule on new media
communities:
- 90% of users are lurkers: people who just read or observe but don’t contribute. These are typically the people that read but never comment.
- 9% of users contribute from time to time. They leave comments on blogs or participate actively in a community but it’s rather seldom.
- 1% of users participates a lot and account for most of the contributions. In social media, this is often the group where influencers and thought leaders can be found
Different members in a given community
Benefits of new media communities
1. Enhance
communication by providing ubiquitous cheap (mostly free) and fast
communication. They provide file sharing, public access services, voice chat
facilities, audio and video conferencing, virtual reality experience (e.g.,
active worlds chat).
2. Can
help establish a leading brand, increase barriers to entry by developing
critical mass, raise interest among customers for available products and
services, help business benefit from word-of-mouth experiences and become
advertising, sales & distribution vehicle thus allowing the organizations
to develop a more responsive CRM strategy
3. Offer
member-customers reduced search costs, access to a broad range of information
from fellow customers, economic benefits like special price, customized offers
and better services. A sponsor benefits from reduced search costs, access to
target group with known preferences, and a global reach.
Knowledge exchange. Individuals can
either give information (by posting conversations) or get information (browsing
or soliciting information by posting questions or comments)
Can
contribute to learning by stimulating continued learning and nurturing a sense
of fellowship and identity, thereby distinguishing themselves from the
temporary spaces of a virtual classroom. New media communities provide educational
institutions the ability to enhance the learning process by improving access:
to special simulations and demonstrations; to a variety of knowledge databases
and experts; to continuous contact with those who can contribute to the
learning process and to moments for better exploration & utilization of
learned material
Conclusion
From the research, it is evident that while some authors
believe in the concept of formation of new media communities, others are still
not for the idea. However, it is true that these communities, just like the
traditional communities are helpful to online users and which makes more people
form a network for communication.
References
Bakardjieva. M. (2003), “Virtual Togetherness: an
Everyday-life Perspective”, in Media, Culture & Society, vol. 25, no. 3,
pp. 291-313.
Fernback, J (2007). Beyond the diluted community concept:
a symbolic interactionist perspective on online social relations in New Media
and Society, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 49-69.
Gochenour, P. H. (2006). Distributed communities and
nodal subjects in New Media and Society. vol. 8 (1), pp. 33-51.
Gradinaru, C.(nd). The Potential Role of New Media in
the Creation of Communities. Retrieved from http://www.fssp.uaic.ro/argumentum/numarul%209/07_Gradinaru_tehno.pdf
Kolb, D G. (2008).Exploring the Metaphor of Connectivity:
Attributes, Dimensions and Duality in Organization Studies.29: 127-144.
Manovich, L (2001). The Language of New Media.MIT
Press, Cambridge.
Manuel castell.Network society.Retrieved from https://youtu.be/tLF5J8Y5zyg?t=10
Oxford dictionary (2016) Oxford University Press.
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