Online Communities (Or: Rae has Feelings)

First up, this post has literally nothing to do with my play activity this week, which can be found here. That’s because gamification’s fun, and I could probably talk about it for a while, but I have FEELINGS about online communities. Feelings that are probably extensive enough to warrant a read more.

So. How can technology be used to create community? The immediate, flippant answer is the magic of the internet. Because creating community in physical space requires at least some degree of physical interaction, which can be really difficult in some cases. Oh, you’re a fan of that series? There’s a convention for it you can go to! In America. In the middle of semester. Using all the money you don’t have to get there.

At the same time, a pretty common complaint about online friends is that they live on the other side of the world – which may as well be Narnia, for how difficult it is to get there (given issues of money, responsibilities, etc) – and on an explicit level, yeah, it’s a complaint about not being able to easily interact with them physically, but implicitly it’s a kind of acknowledgement of the fact that the internet allows you to interact with – and befriend – people there’s every chance you never would have even  passed in the street otherwise.

Online communities are also really good when ‘actual’ interaction just isn’t going to happen for some reason. Part of this is down to ease of use: getting on the internet and talking to people generally requires way less effort than actually physically going out, and it’s a lot easier to post online than it is to get dressed and talk to people when you don’t really feel like a real person. Basically, online interaction just takes way less spoons. Another part of it, though, is the fact that kind of just not interacting feels like a much more viable option online. In brick space, if you go out to a thing and don’t talk the whole time you’re there, that’s kind of weird. If you make a habit of it, it’s a lot weird – especially when you remember how much more effort – and cash – physical interaction takes. On the other hand, spending most of your time online reading other people’s posts rather than contributing your own is relatively normal. It’s debatable just how much being a lurker counts as being part of a community, but it really is only a (relatively non-weird) option within online communities, and the fact that it IS an option is really good for the times when even posting online just takes too many spoons. Closely related to that is the fact that if you want to you can interact with people anonymously, which can make far less stressful for some people.

One of the other benefits of online communities is that they can make things a lot easier when people are new to something – both for them, and for everyone else. Obviously when you’re new to something you’re going to have questions, and a lot of the time people are happy to answer them, but when people are trying to have an in depth discussion and someone else keeps derailing the conversation by asking about the very basics it can get kind of annoying. Being online doesn’t actually make that less common, but it does make it easier to just shoot people a link to some of the basic information – and the permanency (by comparison with physical speech) of a lot of online communication means that once they’ve got the basics down people can share their thoughts in the original thread.

The whole issue of derailing can potentially show up anywhere, but it’s probably most common in conversations about social justice; which brings us, a couple of hundred words into this, to different sorts of online communities. The ones that I’m most involved with are online fandoms and online feminism. Listing them like that is somewhat misleading, though, for two main reasons:

1. My involvement in online communities tends to involve following specific people, many of whom often interact with each other outside of fandom or any other specific context, leading to involvement in a more general online community. This can obviously happen in physical communities as well, but generally more slowly and to a lesser extent.
2. Online communities can be strictly separated, but they can also be blurred and intermingled to the point that differentiating between them is difficult, if not impossible. Guess which category most of the communities I’m involved with tend to be.

In point of fact, I only got involved in the online feminist community through online fandom (and then through the feminist community on Tumblr I discovered some slightly – slightly – more focused online communities, like autostraddle). Really, I only found out about ‘actual’ feminism – as opposed to straw feminism – because of online fandom. Which is kind of one of the other benefits of online communities – wiki-walking. Want to write something full of digressions without actually digressing? Throw in some links to where other people have talked about it! (well, seeing as I’ve already started…) Reading something cool that has a bunch of interesting looking links, plus like five terms you’ve never heard of before? Follow the links and start googling things: you’ll get your answers, and you’re practically guaranteed to keep on following links and looking things up until you have no idea how you got to the latest site from wherever you were originally! The downside of that is realising it’s 2 in the morning and whoops, you kind of have work you need to do for class, but the upside is that not only are you learning things, a lot of the time you’re learning about things that you didn’t even know existed for you to not know about.

Being completely serious for a minute, the potential to get answers to questions you don’t even have the ability to think of, let alone articulate, through online communities is really amazing. I found out about non-binary genders through slowly being sucked into the social justice/queer community on Tumblr, and that led to me figuring out my gender identity. Plenty of people (like, a heartbreaking amount) have mentioned thinking they were broken prior to finding out that asexuality is a thing that exists – often through people online. Online communities are generally much harder to police than anything in the physical world, which can be an issue when it comes to harassment, but also means that they’re often the only radical spaces (politically and socially radical, not hip and/or groovy) people have any sort of access to, making them massively important.

Even beyond the potential to act as a gateway to intersectional feminism and a realisation of queerness, I still have plenty of feelings about online fan communities, but most of them are even less relevant to the question of how technology can help build community than some of what I’ve already babbled about, so I can probably save them for another time – though I will quickly throw in that they can have a huge impact on the real world.

To finish up, though, I’ll turn briefly to the issue of online professional communities. As you may already have guessed, I don’t exactly have a lot of experience with these.

What I do have some experience with, though, is class communities – message boards, forums, or some other sort of online group set up for a class – and what I’ve learned from them is that they’re pretty touch and go when it comes to becoming an actual online community. Often people post enough to meet requirements, without trying to participate in any sort of community building. At the same time, there have been other instances where the communities flourished.

Those vastly different results point to something that’s really important to keep in mind: technology can’t build communities. Not until AIs get out of sci-fi and into reality. Communities are groups of people who are interacting for whatever reason, and as such the building of communities relies upon people interacting with each other as a community, generally because of something they have in common – hobbies, work, geographic location, or anything else. Just shoving people together online and telling them to have at it (as with class or professional communities) might result in the growth of an actual online community, but there’s every chance it won’t. It depends entirely on the people involved and how they all get along.

All of that in mind, the moral of the story seems to be that staying coherent is hard when I have feelings about something. And also that technology has the potential to assist with community building, whether by bringing people together or by making it easier to interact, but the actual community relies on people, not tech, I guess. But mostly the coherency thing.

(Which is another benefit of online communities! If people start babbling, you can reread their thoughts to make sure you know what they mean instead of asking them to repeat themselves! Okay, now I’m done.)