Afterword: Building, Buying, or Being There: Imagining Online Community

Summary

If one were to read Building Virtual Communities for its references alone it would be a valuable book. We have accumulated a considerable body of literature that examines and theorizes online community, and this book does a marvelous job of pushing forward and extending the conversation about their manifestation and maintenance.

But the tensions they manifest and maintain can still be heard as a murmur beneath that conversation. Do we “build” virtual communities, or do they occur on their own, “organically”? Are they “imagined” or “real”? Is online community a new form of encounter with others, or is it a variation on the theme of a (siren) song? We know the virtual cannot (at least, not yet) be entirely disassociated from the “real” (Jones, 1998). And our research into online social phenomena is routinely escaping that trap of dissociation. Less and less of it may be critiqued in ways that Wellman and Gulia (1999) critiqued earlier Internet research that

Treats the Internet as an isolated social phenomenon without taking into account how interactions on the Net fit with other aspects of people's lives. The Net is only one of many ways in which the same people may interact. It is not a separate reality.

(p. 334)

But as our study of the online and off-line worlds we create continues to grow, let us also increase our sensitivity to the ways that we are creating the articulations between online and off-line.