Sociology of Virtual Communities and Social Software Design

Abstract

The Web 2.0 movement is the latest development in a general trend toward computer-mediated social communication. Electronic communication techniques have thus given rise to virtual communities. The nature of this new type of social group raises many questions: are virtual communities simply ordinary social groups in electronic form, or are they fundamentally different? And what is really new about recent Web-based communities? These questions must first be addressed in order to design practical social communication software. To clarify the issue, we will resort to a classical sociological distinction between traditional communities based on personal relations and modern social groups bound by functional, more impersonal links. We will argue that virtual communities frequently present specific features and should not be assimilated with traditional communities. Virtual communities are often bound by reference to common interests or goals, rather than by strong personal relations, and this is still true with Web 2.0 communities. The impersonal and instrumental nature of virtual communities suggests practical design recommendations, both positive and negative, for networking software to answer the real needs of human users.