ABSTRACT
Users’ capacity to carry out their inventions (described in Chapter 3) owes much to their exchanges on user-run internet communities, a new and proliferating type of setting. The broadening of the focus to cover these novel internet communities is done in Chapter 4, pursued through an ethnographic study on the internet and in users’ homes. In the internet forums, people organize themselves around products and technologies in order to discuss use, purchasing, experiences, and community knowledge about products and producers (and so on). These online forums help otherwise dispersed and heterogeneous users to create a specific kind of learning environment that helps people to grow more knowledgeable of the technologies in question. The learning is carried furthest by inventive users, who also give back to these internet communities by providing deep-end peer support for other users.
From a systems change perspective, the internet communities support the adoption and diffusion of S-RET. While internet communities are common far beyond energy technologies—their different forms can be found related to almost every serious technology and hobby area—they have become significant in S-RET diffusion and related systems changes in many countries and for many S-RET technologies. Their significance lies in that they qualify market information, articulate demand, and help citizen users to reconfigure the standard technology in order to meet the specificities of different local contexts. Such user intermediation and market creation activities are important in expanding the markets for S-RET beyond enthusiasts, environmentalists, and other early adopters. The early majority of adopters demand more exposure, clearer information, and less uncertainty about new technology options. The forums make the co-existence and interchange between different peoples, competences, and interests possible, which in turn becomes key in meeting the variety of market, institutional, cultural, and environmental conditions which S-RET faces in different contexts.
These internet energy communities are a new type of energy community that differs from the traditional local community energy that is premised on shared ownership and output, as well as distributed energy cooperatives. The nature of internet communities is that they are dispersed and they do not center on shared produce but on sharing information, knowledge, and procedural advice. The dispersion over the internet allows these communities to bridge much wider geographical distances and their mass of participants allows for a plurality of orientations to coexist—offering a critical mass of competencies with which most problems can become clarified if not solved. These facets allow the new internet-based energy communities to form a “boundary infrastructure” among users that can perform the knowledge-related facets of energy communities more effectively and widely than the locality-based traditional forms. This also affects the nature of the discourse in the forums; instead of the critical and empowering energy autonomy-related discourse found commonly in energy communities, the discourse in (the successful) internet-based energy communities tends to foster what could be called “appreciatively critical” discourse on the focal technology. This discourse purposefully downplays general technology critique and ideological underpinnings in favor of naturalizing discourse, which opens the technical black box of technology and market functioning, but contains the scope of alternatives. This type of discourse appears to be rather effective in increasing the legitimacy of the focal technology in society.
