From community metaphor to Web 2.0 IADIS conference Web Based Communities Amsterdam, 26 July 2008 Marianne van den Boomen Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University

Virtual communities "Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships" (Rheingold 1993) localized social aggregation on the Internet gathering at a collective place having a core of recurrent active users with a shared interest engaged in on ongoing group communication and so developing its own shared values

The community metaphor Imagined community at a virtual space evoked by: 1) communication software (Usenet, IRC, web forums etc)‏ 2) a strong metaphor: community (borrowed from a pre-modern village)

Web 2.0: users, data, scripts participatory culture, collective intelligence, user contributions, ‘communities’ contributing, linking, and sharing of semi-autonomous entities cross-site platform: scripts, databases patterns, clusters, issues, personal networks, groups – but ‘communities’?

Web 2.0 communities? the page is dissolved as unit for collective gathering on the fly aggregation and reassemblage of user enriched data interacting data entities rather than interacting users no common collective place of gathering no ongoing debate between a recurrent group of users

Web 2.0 is a metaphor Software release metaphor: 2.0 as upgrade after 1.0; integral branded package Web 2.0 software: nested scripts and data clouds From page-based communities to data-based assemblages Rethink metaphors and concepts…