Session 2: Online Communities

4th Global Conference

Friday 13th March – Sunday 15th March 2009
Salzburg, Austria

Session 2: Online Communities, Web 2.0 and Emerging Practices in Social Networking
Chair: Melissa DeZwart

Hybrid Communities to Digital Arts Festivals: From Online Discussions to Offline Gatherings
Donata Marletta
Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, Faculty of Arts and Society, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, United Kingdom

The aim of this paper is to contribute to blur the gap between virtual communities and communities based on a face-to-face embodied interaction; going beyond and trying to deconstruct the obsolete and severe online/offline dichotomy. Although today this dichotomy still exists, since the 1990s the concept of virtual community has changed and has been substituted by a much more fluid perception, where informational and physical contacts co-exist and require each other.

Computer networks allow people to create a whole range of new social spaces in which they meet and interact with one another. Through the use of interaction media people have formed thousands of groups to discuss different topics, build collaborations, create knowledge, share mutual interests, play games, and entertain one another. Looking at the landscape of cyberspace we can see that people use different ways to communicate within the Internet; these media can be asynchronous such as email, discussion lists, Usenet, Bulletin board systems (BBSs), and Multi-User Domains (MUDs), or synchronous like chats and virtual environments, or both synchronous and asynchronous like World Wide Web sites. Virtual community represents what can be understood as a form of post-modern community, characterised by the liberation of the individual from social constraints, such as identity, ethnicity, social status and geographical space. Online relationships are based more on shared interests and less on shared social characteristics, and as a result online communities are reasonably homogeneous in their attitude and shared interests, and relatively heterogeneous in the social characteristics of its participants.

It is important to highlight that in order to reinforce the disembodied and intangible relations built around the Internet discussions, members of the virtual communities feel the need to meet during more embodied and tangible face-to-face gatherings.

In this context of continuous change and innovation, I am following digital and experimental arts communities, which make use of both cyberspace and physical space as places for interaction, collaboration, and connectivity. Global gatherings such as festivals devoted to art and technology play a critical role for the maintenance and nourishment of these social groups. International events such as Ars Electrinica (Linz, Austria), Elektra (Montréal, Canada) or Transmediale (Berlin, Germany) draw people from the four corners of the world; they represent both valuable forums and platforms for artists, intellectuals, and specialists, and a unique chance for the all participants to migrate from the cyberspace to a physical space, opening up the opportunity to experience the intense dramaturgy of the festival.

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This paper deals with new forms of political mobilisation and participation in social media, such as blogs, social network sites and the likes. The main focus is on the impor-tance of social networks in providing a “media filter”, functioning as a kind of collective gatekeeper to spread news and information perceived as important, in contrast to the image of the single individual media consumer faced with an in-surmount¬able mass of information. I argue that by investing one’s personal ethos in spreading information and encourage one’s peers in the personal social network to civic engagement and direct action, vital news and calls for action spread quickly across nations and cultures. A form of viral politics ensues that, in con¬cordance with traditional types of mediation and formation of political opinion, pro¬vides an important civic power that might help balancing the biases and failures of ethnocentrism and localism. Drawing on earlier research concerning the effect of social capital created by weak ties on civic engagement, I argue that social networks organised online provide a new type of post-organisational weak ties, functioning as maintained social capital building institutions, encouraging to and organising actions of civic engagement.  I also argue that in a cosmopolitan civic culture, it is not important that each and every individual must act with the same amount of time and work effort on each and every worthy social and poli¬tical cause brought to one’ attention, and I point to the necessity of temporal elites based on voluntarism, taking responsibility for different cases of cosmopolitan acti¬vism. The aim is not only to describe an existing media situation, but also to point out some possible developments that, if nurtured in a proper way, could spur a common cosmopolitan identity and, in coordination with efforts made by exi-sting formal political structures, enable global political problem solving.

More specifically, a case is made for the need for more thorough conceptualisation of new modes of participation: spontaneous, individualised, “unorganised” forms of action. Two concepts, “temporal elites” and “viral politics” are developed for describing how social network membership and density determine how people are recruited to political campaigns.

The theoretical assumptions are further illustrated by the preliminary empirical findings of an ongoing study of Swedish Facebook users and their attitudes and behaviour concerning political participation in social media.

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As members of a society, there is a variable and determinable array of both personality types and the combinations in which they fit together. In this particular exploration, there is a focus on the continuum between those who are self reported introverts and those who are self reported extraverts. Differences in these personality traits result in both positive and negative social aspects that can alter a person’s life and participation with real life social situations; resulting in an aptitude for differences in success, performance and self expectations. With the knowledge and identification of these differences in social performance and hindrances in real life there is reason to believe that a distinction may also exist in virtual life. The paper seeks to explore and lay out the real world distinctions of introverted and extraverted individuals based on published research; then to look into and examine virtual life distinctions of introversion and extraversion in Second Life® to look for any correlations or significance. Utilizing a narrow focused aimed to scan whether or not the already determined personality distinctions hold true for Second Life® avatars and whether or not there is any significance of personality of introversion or extraversion. By comparing information from real life to virtual life the goal is to see if avatar personalities are significantly different or similar to those personalities exhibited in real life. In addition, the examination will seek to provide an impetus for avenues of exploration in the future by providing a framework of virtual reality personalities. These avenues will be aimed to provide insight into a new world filled with avatars that is rich with possibilities and information.