At the height of the dot-com economy, online communities were predicted to be a form of social unification that would wield the collective influence and financial power to affect the outcome of global events. Companies lined up to create or support them even if ostensibly they were really just trying to use them as a way to market products which ranged anywhere from software applications all the way down to hair dyes. As was typical of the late 90’s, online communities were over-hyped and heralded too soon, but the buzz wasn’t entirely unfounded. Online communities do indeed have real world potential to improve people’s lives and they’re set to make a comeback in 2004.
The dominant doctrine of the Internet bubble years was the “network effect” and it was applied to everything from operating systems to communication devices, and unfortunately even to services like online communities. Roughly translated, the “network effect” states that popularity makes something even more popular and popular things have far more utility than less ubiquitous ones. The most popular and useful product naturally ends up controlling the direction of the market and so companies raced each other to rack up the highest number of users. When it comes to communication products like fax machines and proprietary instant messengers, the network effect applies well, but when it comes to social groups, the network effect’s logic falls short.
The network effect is useful for predicting the relationship between utility and the rate of user adoption, but as far as online communities are concerned, utility provides only a portion of the value. People don’t always exchange information purely out of a need for utility. There are also social reasons why people contribute and exchange information. Sometimes people contribute to a public forum as a way of building an online identity. The more they contribute to the utility of a site, the more likely that they’ll become recognized as individuals. By the time the user has reached the point that he is “someone” on a site, he’ll have an identity that’s associated with it and will therefore work to maintain the site’s value. Once a user has established an online identity, he experiences the “community effect,” a sense of belonging that binds him to where his identity is as long as his status of being a recognized personality is maintained.
Since identity is such an important part of producing enduring online communities, the strategy of harnessing the network effect to create dominant online communities ends up being counterproductive. In the late 90’s, sites that managed to earn the popularity that they sought became overcrowded so quickly that they lost their ability to make anyone feel unique. As the population of an online community grows, existing members start to slide back toward anonymity and it becomes increasingly difficult for new members to establish individual identities. Most of the discussion forum applications that are used to build online community sites have little ability to scale in a way that preserves the community effect. However, with some modifications borrowed from social networking and online dating applications, discussion forum software can be adapted to handle a much higher membership capacity. While the membership capacity can be greatly enhanced, online communities will still not be able to scale like networks. A physical limit on membership may need to be imposed to ensure an online community’s ability to endure as a real community.
If the goal is to create real communities that endure through time, a new model of online community building that’s based on geographical limitations may be a better approach to the purely virtual models of the Internet bubble days. Mirroring online communities after neighborhoods and towns may produce better results because virtual communities tend to benefit from also having a degree of physical representation. Modeling after localities will provide online communities with the opportunity to tap into existing infrastructures to solicit for participation, funding, and human resources. On the other side, physical communities will gain additional logistical and communication resources to help support the needs of local residents and businesses.
Ideally, a well-planned physical community doesn’t need an online twin to function as a social unit, but very few people live in such utopian environments. We don’t have to continue living in the disconnected fashion that we’ve gotten used to. Online community applications can help us build communities where it counts the most—in our towns and neighborhoods. While it’d be ambitious to revive the late 90’s dream of online communities disrupting the world social order, it’s not a far stretch to envision online communities as the bridge we need to change our neighborhoods and towns from places where amicable strangers live to places where people have identities.
