Virtual Communities: Bowling Alone, Online Together

by Felicia Wu Song

Does contemporary Internet technology strengthen civic engagement and democratic practice? The recent surge in online community participation has become a cultural phenomenon enmeshed in ongoing debates about the health of American civil society. But observations about online communities often concentrate on ascertaining the true nature of community and democracy, typically rehearsing familiar communitarian and liberal perspectives. This book seeks to understand the technology on its own terms, focusing on how the technological and organizational configurations of online communities frame our contemporary beliefs and assumptions about community and the individual. It analyzes key structural features of thirty award-winning online community websites to show that while the values of individual autonomy, egalitarianism, and freedom of speech dominate the discursive content of these communities, the practical realities of online life are clearly marked by exclusivity and the demands of commercialization and corporate surveillance. Promises of social empowerment are framed within consumer and therapeutic frameworks that undermine their democratic efficacy. As a result, online communities fail to revolutionize the civic landscape because they create cultures of membership that epitomize the commodification of community and public life altogether.

Genres: Academic

178 pages, Paperback

First published June 24, 2009

About the author

Felicia Wu Song (PhD, University of Virginia) is a cultural sociologist of media and digital technologies, currently serving as professor of sociology at Westmont College in Santa Barbara. Her publications include Virtual Communities: Bowling Alone, Online Together and articles in such scholarly journals as Gender and Society and Information, Communication and Society.

Reviews

[John Carter McKnight · Rating 3 out of 5]

The four star rating is a compromise between a 5 for theoretical strength and a 2 for ill-fitting methodology. There are some gems of insight and analysis in this book, and it's going to be an invaluable resource for my own research. On the other hand, it's got some serious flaws.

The author buries the lead *deeply,* the author doesn't really state her thesis until the last few pages, the bulk of the work seeming disjointed and meandering in the absence of a clear roadmap up front. Also, her research is a poor fit for her analysis: the book would be stronger without her sociological data set, as purely a theoretical contribution to the literature on democracy and online community. Her definition of "community" unhelpfully conflates infrastructure, branded content and groups of people communicating or working around a common interest.