Baym mentioned in Chapter 4 that there are many different definitions of the term “community”, and that there is not a consensus universal description. After listening to the interview with Rheingold and watching the IRL documentary about the Bronze, it certainly seems that group members know when they are a part of a community. Baym said on pg. 72 that “many online groups develop a strong sense of group membership.” In my opinion, this seems to be a good starting point for defining community.

Baym noted five qualities group members share that typically arise in an online community. These five qualities included a sense of space, shared practice, shared resources and support, shared identities and interpersonal relationships. As a member of MemphisTigers.org, an online forum devoted primarily to University of Memphis athletics (namely basketball and football), I can easily identify all of these qualities.

Just as we saw with the Bronze message board, MemphisTigers.org is metaphorically based on space. When posting in the forum, members use the word “place” all the time to refer to the domain. Another salient part of a community is shared practices. Although there are tons on MemphisTigers.org, one of interest is using the term “pope” to respond to an original post that has duplicated information from another thread. This practice started a few years ago when a former pope had died, and multiple threads appeared to discuss it.

Another quality that showed up on the IRL documentary and in Chapter 2 of the Rheignold study was the emotional support that happens online. As dysfunctional as MemphisTigers.org can be, there are a core group of users who, from time to time, will post on the board asking for prayers during difficult situations. There requests are always answered by other members with encouraging words.

I noticed in our readings that interpersonal relationships often transcended the online community. Members would gather offline and meet up to get to know one another. I’ve never met up with anyone from MemphisTigers.org (that I didn’t’ already know), but a core group of members (usually the ones who post the most), have arranged meetings at games and other events. They usually post online about their experiences, thus making it known to everyone else that they did actually meet.

Rheingold said it best when answering a question about critiques of online communities when he noted that the relationships that developed were just as real as any offline relationships. These relationships define the community.