Social Media Natives’ Invisible Online Spaces: Proposing the Concept of Digital Gemeinschaft 2.0

Abstract

This study proposes the concept of “digital Gemeinschaft 2.0,” through examining Rich Ling’s employment of Ferdinand Tönnies’ Gesellschaft (market society) and Gemeinschaft (fellowship), when conceptualizing the “digital Gemeinschaft.” Drawing on 11 in-depth interviews with social media natives in Norway, it identifies three recurring themes, reflecting (1) a Gesellschaft attentiveness, (2) continued Gemeinschaft, with occasional public orientations, and (3) information gathering and learning without direct public partaking. This study emphasizes social media natives’ utilization of social media for maintaining social relationships through an active negotiation and construction of space. A continuous attentiveness to social space is connected to features of Gesellschaft in social media: the utilization of people’s data traces for economic purposes. The social media natives’ online activities are still tied to the market rationales of social media corporations, however, as platforms both facilitate and profit from their practices. The digital Gemeinschaft 2.0 concept hence highlights a continued tension between Gesellschaft and digital Gemeinschaft in social media as both medium and (social and public) space.

Means of Emotional Impact on the Audience in User Media Conten

“…Secondly, the competition between publications today goes beyond the media sphereauthors compete not only with other publishers, but also with all forms of organizing free time, which makes the process of competition itself more aggressive. Thirdly, almost every user today becomes a publisher, introducing new, non-canonical models of interaction with the audience into the elements of their works (Salter, 2022). All these processes are especially noticeable in user content, the variatization of which is provided by both technical and technological transformations…”

Negotiating the Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft Dichotomy: Appalachian Medical Student Perceptions of Practice☆

“…(Tönnies [1887(Tönnies [ ]2001 This dichotomous framework for understanding social relationships has led to numerous lines of inquiry, critique, and extension. For example, Ling (2014) and Salte (2022) have reconceptualized Gemeinschaft as a community-type found through digital relationships and social media platforms. Sennett (2019), meanwhile, argues Gemeinschaft is an imagined archetype: "no matter how infrequently we can actually experience Gemeinschaft, we persistently seek it out, measuring real social relations by this idea which can be sustained only in imagination" (37).…”