Open Diary was the first online diary service to be created, in existence from 1998 to 2014. An ethnographic case study was performed in 2006-2008 to explore community-creation on the site, using the theory of sense of virtual community (Blanchard & Markus, 2002, 2004) to analyse site practices and the member experience. The study describes a cohesive community based on a culture of support, empathy and open sharing of personal lives enabled by anonymity and privacy protections. The article discusses these results in terms of community-creation online and compares Open Diary to current forms of life writing online, blogging in particular, arguing that it was the members' and designers' understanding and experience of the traditional pen-and-paper diary that enabled the building of a unique community on the site, creating an experience that is perhaps no longer possible to replicate due to the social and cultural changes that have occurred on the web since 1998.
This is a case study exploring the social scene created on a newlydeveloped online service for increasing the study motivation of 16-18-year-old students in vocational education in Finland. The developers wished to motivate participation by the addition of a communal chat space to engender a sense of community on the site. The analysis shows that the students appropriated the communal chat space for uses in line with their prior experience of online interaction, while the developers had based their design on a very different experience. However, the developers were able to respond flexibly to encourage interaction rather than limiting topics of conversation to those desired in the original design. As a result, the communal page could be seen to fulfil some of the expectations of the developers in unexpected ways. The case offers learning points for developers and administrators who wish to create online social spaces with a particular aim.
This article discusses the meaning and function of "community" as a discourse on the image-sharing website Imgur. The analysis shows that the community term has many meanings and serves as a shorthand for a wide variety of social pract ices, and these meanings are shaped by the experiences of social action leading to the use of the term. Based on ethnographic data, nexus analysis provides an understanding of how the interactions related to community on the site come to take place the way they do. In conceiving of these interactions as mediated discourse, the article provides a fresh approach to the long-established academic discussion on the definition of community, suggesting a new conception of the community term as a boundary object, which takes on various meanings and functions as it is employed in social action. On Imgur, the community term is associated with an imagined connection to similar others, a shared culture, and the commitment to participation required by the intertextuality of the site content and the challenge of learning to read and create the content that is popular on the site.
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