Letters to the Editors

摘要

I am very pleased to see the selection of my 2008 paper 'Learning relations and networks in web-based communities' in the 10-year anniversary edition of IJWBC (Haythornthwaite, 2008). In revisiting that paper I find much that has remained the same and resonates with contemporary issues about successful organising of online communities. In particular, the network perspective holds up well, and indeed has become very widely spread as we are constantly presented with network diagrams of connections among members of distributed groups, clustering of linkages between websites, twitter conversational networks, and the common interpretation of 'social networking'. These analyses often claim to have identified 'communities'. They may have, but as I have held since the beginning of my work, community is a hypothesis to be tested (Haythornthwaite et al., 2000). However, as we continue to work, learn and socialise online, it is also valid to reconsider what we mean by 'community' (Haythornthwaite, 2007). We have certainly done that as we have rather rapidly adopted the validity of 'virtual communities', and now even spend time comparing them to 'geo-communities' in terms of social network relations and ties, longevity and persistence, and social capital outcomes. What has changed is that the instances of purely online community are becoming increasingly difficult to find. Both online and offline worlds are intersecting with the rise of the net generation (Rainie, 2012), increasing mobile connectivity, technologies that connect the local and the virtual (e.g., QR codes, GPS, Foursquare). Promoting community is now more likely to entail managing the interaction between online and offline that perfecting on or offline connection (Haythornthwaite and Kendall, 2010).