Chapter 10: Identity and Power in Online Communities of Practice: Working in the Extreme Margins of a Celebrity Gossip Blogsite

The recent popularity of social networking platforms such as Facebook and MySpace would suggest to some that online social communities are something recent and novel. However, the reality is that ever since the technology was developed in the 1960s allowing two computers to interface with one another, human beings have been exploiting that technology in order to engage in social practice and to form online communities.

The literature demonstrates that individuals draw on the social resources they are familiar with in their offline worlds in order to participate in their online communities. However, the nature of the medium dictates particular modifications. A surprising finding from this line of research is the extent to which individuals can carry out community-building practices with a limited amount of information about their fellow participants. In a study of one type of virtual networking system, Multi-User Domains (MUDs), Reid (1999) highlighted the fact that individual users of these sites construct a virtual world through the only channel available to them: written text. Despite the reduced channel, they engage one another in elaborate social practices that include all of the hallmarks of face-to-face communities, including virtual violence and virtual marriages. Furthermore, individuals are operating with highly unreliable information about their fellow participants; in particular, screen names are easily changed and vary widely in the level of correspondence they exhibit to one’s physical identity offline.