Is the experience of a virtual community any different from the experience of a real community?

A virtual community is a social network existing over the virtual mediums. The internet is the most important and most far-reaching platform for such ‘societies’.

As a CMC (Computer Mediated Communication) the experience in such communities is subjected to the concerns associated with human computer interaction like modality of communication, while in real communities the associated concerns are much different like body language,appearance,facial expressions etc. , however these communities exhibit some of the properties exhibited by real groups such as homophily(the tendency of similar people to form ties), the existence of communication clusters etc.

These communities extend beyond the physical constraints of geographical location but still show a significant tendency of tie formation between two people in the same geographical area (propinquity), which can be an indication that the ties formed in these spaces are in many cases the reflection of ties formed in real communities, though this effect is significantly viewable in social media, multiple communities also exist in which members have no real association in the real world.

Virtual communities have affected many social interactions since their conception. They have affected how we talk, do business or make friends.

Virtual worlds are another form of the virtual communities, which are essentially 3D simulations of the world in which people interact with each other through an online presence known as avatar. These communities are closer to real communities based on the fact that they carry a face-to-face interaction and that the avatars need to be in the same virtual area to interact although the real actors are not.

Social media are also subjected to multiple concerns associated with the anonymity and trust issue between in its members. In theory the members of a virtual community can remain completely anonymous, this combined with the fact that the rapid content on these networks cannot be subjected to review in most cases leads to loss of reliability of such content. However such communities exist where the content is reviewed and is edited to maintain quality and reliability.

Thus we conclude that the experience of a virtual community is much different from a real community for a end user on an individual level because of the difference in the interactions, but virtual networks exhibit behaviour patterns exhibited by users in real communities on a large scale. 

Is the new media really new ?

New media refers to any media resource which can be accessed without a limitation on time and place, can provide interactive feedbacks and allows for real time generation of content.

As this definition indicates, new media opens the possibility of a two way communication channel for most end users thus eliminating the monopoly of a few producers over widely available content.

In old media resources ranging from 14th century print to the television introduced in the late 80s, the production and distribution of content was a costly affair thus limiting the content to a few individuals. This restricted the variety of the content available for the masses.  

However new media, by reducing the cost and time factors involved in the creation of widely available content has blurred the line between authors and readers. In a metaphorical sense old media can be taken as an auditorium where only one person has a mike and others listen to only this particular person, while in new media every person has a microphone to speak and several earphones to listen to any particular person they want. 

 

A schematic for new media where every node can have a two way communication with other nodes

This particular feature of new media has affected society in many ways like in the case of old media it was rather easy to manipulate the collective consciousness of society by exercising control over the few media resources existing in the society while new media decentralizes this control of a few nodes over the content society is being exposed to, thus building up many small blocks of collective consciousness following many independent ideologies.

Thus we can conclude that new media is in many ways is really ‘new’ in the sense that it has radically affected the nature of communication existing in the society until its introduction from a one way communication originating from few sources to a rather independent and rapidly expanding network of dynamically generated content.

Media as a addition and reflection of man

To precisely understand what roles media plays in our lives and in society as a whole we need to first understand what media is. By media we refer to the multiple channels of information flow existing within the society.

Various media have been a part of human life since prehistoric time evolving from cave paintings to the complicated network of information we see around us today. Here we analyse the role of media as a prosthetic to human abilities and as a mirror to the society in which it resides.
It would be helpful in this analysis to classify media in the categories of form and content.

Form refers to the basis on which the information moves within the society, While the content is the information that is carried. As a metaphor form can be viewed as a car while the content as the passenger.

Form in media sees changes with the accepted technologies present in the society, with time form has evolved from town criers to the internet. Each form of media has some characteristics like :

1. Ease of duplication or Reproducibility
2. Reach or the Pervasiveness of the underlying technology
3. Perceptual acceptance by the average user - Ease of use

The content however is more complicated to break down as it depends on the society, The system under which the content is generated and the technology on which it rides. The content can vary from a political propaganda poster, a popular dark humour TV show to a interactive blog with comments(much like this one :) ). However Content can be analysed on the factors listed below :

1. Authenticity
2. Social viability and Acceptance
3. The effect it has on the society 

 Media being the means of information flow in a society gets influenced by and in turn, influences the social structure. The evidence for this can be found in the radical changes society saw on the introduction of print media(The Renissance) and the internet(the information age). Media can influence various aspects of a society like :

1. The Collective Consciousness
2. Information Cascades 
3. Cultures 

The relationship among these can be roughly summarized as follows :

These variables will be discussed in detail in future posts. 

Media as a extension to man and society

The ability of Media to act as a extension to human senses and abilities ie. A prosthetic, largely depends on how well it integrates with human perception and how it manages the limited cognitive resource of attention. Because of this reason both the proper form and content are required to determine the success of media as a prosthetic.The form appeals to the human perception, the technical ability to create experiences similar to daily life but embedded with digital information allow us to appeal to multiple senses, also proper content is required that appeals to a significant amount of people so that this augmentation actually enhances some ability.
Media acting as a transparent and trustworthy reflection of a society,i.e. a mirror requires it's content to be un-dominated and unbiased, also the creation of media being accessible to a large crowd makes it open to more views which lets it represent the society better. The relationships discussed here are however not simple in nature, there exists a complicated relationship between the form, content and society in which every element influences the other.

(All of my posts will be more or less using the terminology defined here in the analysis)