Online Communities, Communication in

Shared Social Meanings

Language practices have particular power to create community because they simultaneously provide the content of discussion and implicitly invoke the group's shared social meanings. To communicate appropriately in an online group, a participant must have something to say about the topic under discussion and must also understand the purposes or goals embedded in the situation; the objective structures or conditions of the situation; the identities of the interlocutors; the frame or genre of the event; and the beliefs, values, norms, and affective mood of the interaction. Community members rely on their shared understandings of these social meanings as they choose their words, tone, recipients, formatting, and more. Fans in a soap opera discussion group, for instance, understand that the group values niceness, a value which functions to promote open discussion of the shows. Appropriate contributions thus implicitly reinforce the value-laden logical systems that made them appropriate, while inappropriate contributions are likely to be met with explicit discussion of the violation, a process that further codifies a group's shared meaning system.

Forms of Shared Practice

Among the most important language practices for the development of community online are vocabulary, forms and uses of nonverbal communication, genres or frames, and humor. These practices may be shared at multiple embedded levels. The innermost and potentially richest level of shared language practice occurs in the comparatively small group of a single Web board, chat room, mailing list, or other online environment. At this level, distinctive group identities emerge, and the feeling of belonging to a community becomes possible. Indeed, the extent to which a group is regarded as a community by its members depends heavily on the [Page 1016]degree to which it has created distinctive practices that only regular group participants fully understand.

Shared ingroup vocabulary is common in online communities. Fan groups, for instance, often share coded names for television characters or song titles. A sleazy soap-opera character named “Will” might be called “Swill,” or the acronym “ITEOTWAWKI(AIFF)” may refer to a song titled “It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine).” Nonverbal codes distinctive to particular groups include conventions about the photographs that accompany messages posted to a specific Web board. Members of a wedding Web board, for example, use photographs of themselves with pictures of children, flowers, and other heavily gendered romantic and domestic themes, while participants in a weightlifting Web board choose pictures of action film stars.

Groups also develop genres, or categories of message, of their own. One online group uses the practice of asking obviously stupid questions as a practical joke to distinguish group insiders from outsiders. In another group, members greet one another with “whuggles” (the appropriate use of which requires considerable knowledge of community relational dynamics). Individual groups also vary in the ways they create structural and social sanctions against those who abuse the group's systems of meaning. For instance, considerable variation across groups occurs in the tone of reproaches for violations of netiquette (the ever-evolving standards of polite online behavior).

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