From community metaphor to Web 2.0

IADIS conference Web Based Communities

Amsterdam, 26 July 2008

Marianne van den Boomen Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University

Virtual communities

"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" (Rheingold 1993)

• localized social aggregation on the Internet• gathering at a collective place• having a core of recurrent active users • with a shared interest• engaged in on ongoing group communication• and so developing its own shared values

The community metaphor

Imagined community at a virtual space evoked by:

1) communication software (Usenet, IRC, web forums etc)

2) a strong metaphor: community (borrowed from a pre-modern

village)

Web 2.0: users, data, scripts

• participatory culture, collective intelligence, user contributions, ‘communities’

• contributing, linking, and sharing of semi-autonomous entities• cross-site platform: scripts, databases• patterns, clusters, issues, personal networks, groups – but

‘communities’?

Web 2.0 communities?

• the page is dissolved as unit for collective gathering • on the fly aggregation and reassemblage of user enriched data • interacting data entities rather than interacting users • no common collective place of gathering• no ongoing debate between a recurrent group of users

Web 2.0 is a metaphor

• Software release metaphor: 2.0 as upgrade after 1.0; integral branded package

• Web 2.0 software: nested scripts and data clouds• From page-based communities to data-based assemblages

• Rethink metaphors and concepts…