Is an online community really a community?

No one seems to be able to come up with a universally acceptable definition for 'community'. Up until the advent of a postal service communities were generally limited by their geographical location. As soon as people could communicate with each other without having to be physically present then communities started to emerge where the boundaries that defined them were no longer physical.

We often speak about online community and building communities around web sites but just calling something by a name doesn't make it that thing. I could call myself a dog but it wouldn't make me one. However, online communities do reflect offline communities in many ways and so are communities if we allow a definition of community to go beyond a physical location.

To quote from Wikipedia on a 'sense of community':

In a seminal 1986 study, McMillan and Chavis identify four elements of "sense of community": 1) membership, 2) influence, 3) integration and fulfillment of needs, and 4) shared emotional connection. They give the following example of the interplay between these factors:

Someone puts an announcement on the dormitory bulletin board about the formation of an intramural dormitory basketball team. People attend the organizational meeting as strangers out of their individual needs (integration and fulfillment of needs). The team is bound by place of residence (membership boundaries are set) and spends time together in practice (the contact hypothesis). They play a game and win (successful shared valent event). While playing, members exert energy on behalf of the team (personal investment in the group). As the team continues to win, team members become recognized and congratulated (gaining honor and status for being members), Influencing new members to join and continue to do the same. Someone suggests that they all buy matching shirts and shoes (common symbols) and they do so (influence).^[9]

Anyone who has developed relationships through an online social networking service will recognise that all of these factors can be present. However, it should be noted that the illustration above does include an element of propinquity (physical closeness). It should also be noted that many people who use social networking sites are simply supporting relationships already formed offline (e.g. friends and families).

But it is also true that propinquity can play a major role in building relationships. In 1961 a Psychologist called Newcomb undertook a study involving new students at a University. Students who agreed to join in the study were given free accomodation and the students would have to share the accomodation with another student picked by the research team. The first year involved trying to match students who shared similar values, but the interesting stuff didn't happen until the second year when students were deliberately mixed with those of opposing values (from Foundations of Psychology 3rd Ed - Nick Hayes). It turned out that propinquity (physically sharing the room) had a far greater impact on forming relationships than shared values. The people we see regularly are those we tend to like the best. Physical presence is important in forming a relationship with someone else and this is something that will always be missing from an online community.

So far then we have seen that whilst online communities do form around shared interests and values without being able to meet the community will lack something that is very important in human relationships.

What about the Christian view of a community?

This is very hard to relate to Internet communities because the world was very different in biblical times. All of the references to community refer to people being in the same geographical area. The church was defined by where it was - even though there was a chance to move from one church to another and still be accepted as part of the community, in this sense community reached beyond the physical and was defined by belonging to a particular faith system. However, it does appear that those who moved between churches but were unknown to the church they were going to required some kind of recommmendation to the new church.

The early church faced a problem with those who saw the physical world as being evil and something to escape from (generally came to be known as Gnostism). There is a danger that elevating online community to being equal to a physical community would result in a similar way of thinking, that somehow the physical no longer matters.

So then whilst an online community is a community in some sense it will always be lacking something that a community with some propinquity can offer. A purely online church can never be the equivalent of a church based in a local geographical community. Where people cannot attend a local church then a virtual church can offer an alternative, but the church must never seek to promote an online church as a true alternative to the local church.