Communities on the move

Citation

Schwartz, D.G. (2009), "Communities on the move", Internet Research, Vol. 19 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr.2009.17219daa.001

Communities on the move

Article Type: Editorial From: Internet Research, Volume 19, Issue 4

Use to be that when you moved, between countries, between cities, or even within the same city, you changed communities. The concept of community as geographically-bound support system of people with common interests, centred as it often is around church, synagogue, mosque, or the aptly named “community center”, continues to undergo fundamental change.

Now, more often than not, your community can “go with you” and the connections you develop carry-on across borders. Even geographically-defined communities that have leveraged online presence to provide a sense of belonging, support, and service to its members, do so both for members that live in physical proximity and continue to fill a need when members leave, perhaps to return, perhaps not.

Most studies of online community have relied on survey data to explain various behavioural phenomena. Toral, Martínez-Torres, Barrero, and Cortés in “An empirical study about the driving forces behind online communities”, use actual community interactions and social network analysis (SNA), rather than a survey, to show that network cohesion, centrality, and structure play decisive roles in determining the community success over time. Using SNA as a basis for analysing and understanding online community activity has tremendous potential and there is much future research to be done investigating the aspects leading to the successful creation and maintenance of online community.

One of the more unique genres of community is that of the blogging community, based, as it is, on a common interest to provide ongoing updates to daily activities surrounding a given topic. While the subject matter of blogs is as diverse as humanity itself, the factors leading to community identification are conducive to classification and aggregation. “The effect of community identification on attitude and intention toward a blogging community” by Shen and Chiou introduces us to some of those factors and shows that community identity significantly reduces perceived community pressure resulting in higher levels of participation and satisfaction.

Another area in which communities have metamorphosed is in relation to the concept of brand community, based on Consumer Culture Theory in which consumers are actively involved in the marketplace playing a role in creating a brand. Tarkiainen, Ellonen and Kuivalainen, examine the nature of brand community as part of proposing and validating a new conceptual model that helps explain the nature of the relationship between magazine print brands, web site loyalty, and online magazine content in “Complementing consumer magazine brands with internet extensions?”

One of the more traditional, geographically-bound über-community entities is that of the municipality. The municipality provides us with a prime example of nested communities and in general it will embrace multiple communities within its geographic and legislative bounds. By understanding how municipalities present themselves online we can strive towards better communal services and more effective and responsive e-government. Yet despite the multitude of municipal web sites, each of which intuitively serves similar types of needs in municipal populations, there is a surprisingly wide range of approaches to municipal web site design. Miranda, Sanguino and Bañegil study this anomaly and in “Quantitative assessment of European municipal web sites: development and use of an evaluation tool” present a first attempt to develop a web site assessment index that can be employed to compare the current usage of the internet by municipalities.

Also in this issue of Internet Research, Lu and Su present “Factors affecting purchase intention on mobile shopping web sites” and investigate the influence of user anxiety and five other factors as the main elements leading to mobile commerce adoption. Perhaps enabling us to get more shopping done as we move between communities …

Communities play an important role in our social, economic, emotional, spiritual and physical wellbeing. Oftentimes the extent to which we miss them when we leave exceeds the level of appreciation we had while still within their physical bounds. While we may not always be able to return from whence we came (though it is nice when we can), our virtual world is making it increasingly possible to feel that communal warmth – no matter where we are.

David G. Schwartz