ABSTRACT

In 1993, Howard Rheingold brilliantly captured the zeitgeist of the emerging Internet with his book entitled Virtual Communities: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Although the image of online settings as communities can be traced to the Internet’s founding documents (e.g., Licklider & Taylor, 1968), Rheingold’s characterization captured the imagination just as Internet use began to enter the mainstream of public consciousness. The community metaphor was so successful that it effectively banished alternative metaphors of the day (e.g., “information superhighway”). More importantly, the community metaphor continues to influence the way we think about and study the social Internet. Nowhere is this more apparent than with contemporary social networking sites (SNSs) such as MySpace and Facebook. My goal in this chapter is to assess the status of online settings like MySpace as sites for virtual communities. MySpace and other SNSs such as Facebook are not communities in any singular sense, but rather function as social venues in which many different communities may form. Thus I seek to determine what conditions are necessary for the formation of communities, as well as how often and where they form. My approach is decidedly eclectic, drawing from the historic literature on community, a large observational study of MySpace, and on analyses of select cases. I begin by revisiting the community metaphor in contemporary discourse about SNSs, MySpace in particular, and then ground the discussion in the more traditional sociological literature on community. From there, we may assess the requirements for virtual communities, ask how frequently SNS users are involved in community activity, and explore

the conditions that most facilitate the development of communities. All of this will, I hope, leave us at chapter’s end with a renewed, but more cautious, appreciation of the concept of “virtual community.”