Online Communities: Usability, Sociabilty, Theory and Methods [chapter]

Jenny Preece
2001 Frontiers of Human-Centered Computing, Online Communities and Virtual Environments  
Internet usage doubles every fifty-two days. Over eighteen million people are AOL subscribers-many of whom are attractive by AOL's emphasis on email, chats, instant messaging and, of course, the web. Active Worlds, a graphical chat environment, has over a million participants. During the first quarter of 1998 450,000 messages were posted to 20,000 UseNet groups. And the numbers of people coming online continues to increase as e-commerce, online education, online health, and increasing amounts
more » ... information and people with whom to chat, entices even more people. Meanwhile, according to Moore's computing power doubles every eighteen months. For the well educated, with jobs and Internet stock, the future looks bright. However, the gap continues to broaden between low and high income, poorly and welleducated people. There are fears that socializing face-to-face will decline leading to an unprecedented number of lonely, psychologically impoverished people. Online communities is an emerging discipline in university curricula and research. However it is finding a place in agendas of major laboratories and national funding bodies (Brown, 1999b; Brown, 1999c) . Like other new topics, its status is debatable. At a similar stage, researchers tried to characterize humancomputer interaction in 90s. At an National Science Foundation workshop, Stu Card identified four stages in the growth of a discipline (Card, 1991 ) (Olson & Olson, 1997 . Building and evaluating individual systems or point systems, is the first stage in early development. As more communities develop, research intensifies and comparative evaluation studies start to identify dimensions for success. This is the second developmental stages. The third stage is characterized by understanding the relationships between various developmental stages more thoroughly, so that models, laws and theory can be articulated -an indicator of the discipline reaching the fourth stage and coming of age. Current research in online communities deals primarily with individual communities -i.e., stage one. However, critics argue that the basic technology (i.e., email, listservers, bulletin boards, chats etc.) are established technologies, which people use enthusiastically, so they question why research is needed. There are four reasons: • The Internet enables millions of people to communicate online at once. Little is known about the social and technical dynamics of mass communication involving thousands and millions of participants via the Internet. • Online populations will be diverse in terms of culture, age, technical and educational experience. Technology with appropriate usability for this broad range of users is needed. Usability Three areas of central importance for online community development are: design and representation; security and privacy; and scalability. Design and representation Knowledge and theories about culture and social activity in online communities provide a foundation for software design. Research is needed to develop representations to reveal online behavior as it happens,
doi:10.1007/978-1-4471-0259-5_18 fatcat:5agfxxlhuvcjpcd7f5vflbffp4